Portland’s thriving food-truck scene is a destination in its own right. Photo courtesy Roboppy via Flickr

A New York minute is understood to be the interval of time between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy in the car behind you honking his horn.

Lately it’s also enough time for a hungry Manhattanite to get a substantial grass-fed beef hamburger, sourced straight from the La Cense ranch in Montana to its New York “Beef Burger Truck”; an iced, rainforest-friendly coffee from the Street Sweets truck, served up in a clear but biodegradable cup; or a cone of whole-bean vanilla ice cream made from hormone-free dairy and pure cane sugar, from the Van Leeuwen Ice Cream truck. And still have change left over from a $20.

They’re part of a new wave of Net-savvy street food vendors across the country who are transporting the Slow Food movement’s embrace of local, sustainably-grown, and uncommonly delicious ingredients beyond the confines of pricey restaurants into the nation’s coast-to-coast love affair with street food. Call them the nouvelle food trucks.

Despite the grim state of the economy, urbanites are spending as much if not more of their food budgets on eating out than on cooking in. But rather than sit down to an expensive restaurant meal, upscale food trucks and carts have become go-to venues for quick, tasty meals. The nouvelle trucks are an even newer breed of mobile entrepreneurs, who specialize in whipping up relatively cheap fare that doesn’t require eaters to chuck their health — or their ethics — in the gutter.

Sweet tweets

To help build their brands, many nouvelle trucks use Facebook to build customer loyalty, and Twitter to broadcast their truck locations.

It also creates business. Since “the police can at any time tell you that you need to move,” says Di Mille, “I can tweet that I’ve moved from 45th to 46th Street,” guiding thousands of hungry followers to their next fix of freshly made, all-natural whoopie pies, cookies, and croissants, as well as his truck’s signature locally-roasted, fair trade coffee.

A big social-media presence also leads to more catering jobs, he says — gigs that can be crucial to the bottom line for a food truck business, particularly one featuring expensive upscale ingredients.

Only a handful of “good food” trucks are driving around New York. It’s a different scene in Portland, Ore., recently rated the nation’s #1 street food city by CNN. There, more than 400 vendors vie for the hearts and mouths of greater Portland’s 2 million or so residents, as well as its influx of tourists.

Brett Burmeister, who owns, manages, and writes most of the blog foodcartsportland.com, says that while not every vendor touts an organic or sustainable ethos, environmental conscientiousness pervades his city’s street-food scene: “I’d say 90 percent [of the carts] are using biodegradable types of containers.” While Portland has banned Styrofoam containers, “you rarely even find the clear plastic clamshells,” he says.

The food cart boom has also benefited from the city’s long-time embrace of Oregon-grown and produced foods, says Burmeister. “All the weekend carts go to the farmers markets in the morning for their supplies.” And at least one stocks up hyper-locally: “YoGio, a Korean cart in north Portland, is getting vegetables from a local front-yard farmer,” he says, “a lady just down the street who is growing enough that they can get what they need.”

In the San Francisco Bay area, 80 street-food vendors will participate in the second annual Eat Real Festival, held in Oakland in late August. The event is dedicated to the idea “that delicious, convenient, affordable and sustainable food should be celebrated through an annual food festival,” says director Susan Coss. Vendors can charge no more than $5 per serving, and must include at least a few local ingredients in their dishes.

Although only 40 street food vendors participated in 2009’s inaugural fest, 70,000 people showed up to eat (organizers expected around 30,000). The carts took in around $300,000 over three days, and the event broke even on expenses in its first year.

“We were very lucky, the timing was perfect,” says Coss. In addition to the area’s longstanding enthusiasm for local, sustainable, and organic, “there was a big upsurge of interest in street food, it was new and hot. On top of that, the economy was horrible, and people weren’t paying to go anywhere [out of town].”

All of Eat Real’s vendors will be sourcing locally and sustainably — some because the festival requires it, others because their clientele like it.

Still other Bay Area nouvelle food trucks do it out of a personal commitment to helping build a better food system, one serving at a time. Take Let’s Be Frank, which sells grass-fed beef hot dogs from carts and trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

For most of his former career managing high-end San Francisco restaurants, cofounder Larry Bain paid top dollar for prime cuts of grass-fed beef. But the ranchers told him they could not live on selling rib eye and filets alone: “Every cow has about 600 pounds of trim,” Bain says, “a significant amount of meat per cow” that gourmet restaurants don’t want.

Let’s Be Frank pays around $2.50 per pound for this high-quality beef trim, says Bain, compared to $1.60 or so on the commodity market. “Sometimes it’s the tipping point for the ranchers, letting them support their families and stay in business,” he says.

Combined with more and more food-aware customers, the result is a thriving hot dog cart business that doesn’t have to compromise on health or animal welfare: “People are starting to understand the external costs of cheap food,” says Bain, and to grasp that paying fifty cents extra for one of his hot dogs is “a good investment.”

New York City’s People’s Pops buys the fruit for its succulent ice pops, sold at seasonal booths, from regional growers who need additional markets for their apples, berries, plums, and more. “You have an oversupply issue in season,” says co-owner Nathalie Jordi. “We take all that excess fruit and preserve it in a way that adds value. We can pay a fair price, and then sell it, which makes us money. The customer gets their fruit in a way that’s delicious, local, and healthy. It’s a win-win-win.”

The Whole Foods of the streets?

The good fast-food trend has yet to significantly transcend its origins in higher-income brackets, according to Caleb Zigas, executive director of La Cocina, a San Francisco nonprofit food-business incubator. “Vendors in low-income commu
nities are vastly unaware of the other contingent” of street-food vendors, he says.

La Cocina provides low-cost commercial kitchen space and other business development services to 30 food entrepreneurs, primarily women from the city’s lower-income Latino neighborhoods. “We don’t require any of our businesses to support the ‘good food’ movement, even though we support it,” says Zigas, because their “target market is not interested enough in local foods to support the rise in prices.” The program promotes sustainable practices in other ways, however: “We’re a certified green kitchen, so anyone operating here is working on green business principles.” And given all the great produce grown in California year-round, he says, many vendors inevitably use local foods.

But tensions can arise between the old and new schools of food vending. Back in New York, last summer Street Sweets had angry confrontations with immigrant street food vendors, who feared losing prime midtown sidewalk locations to the brightly painted truck and its upscale goodies.

Certainly many of the nouvelle truck owners seem to be people with higher educations, or former business and corporate careers that honed their skills in marketing and social media.

“They have a lot of resentment toward us,” di Mille says, “because [they] look at us and say, ‘Why? When you have so many other options?'”

For di Mille, it seems to be the classic American entrepreneur’s drive to succeed, as well as selling something he can believe in that also makes customers happy — like cookies and cupcakes. “We’re very passionate and proud of our business,” he says. “With so many choices within eyeshot of my mobile business, if you come to me, that’s an honor.”

Jordi predicts that the movement for local-sustainable-organic street food is only going to grow. The challenge is figuring out how to meet demand without compromising values. “There’s this vast divide between artisan food at the top, and this mass-produced shlock,” she says. “I really see potential for a product like ours to go somewhere in the middle.”

]]>http://grist.org/article/food-nouvelle-food-trucks-make-fast-food-with-slow-values/feed/0sweettreats_462x360.jpgPortland's food trucksSweet Treats truck windowPa. Rep. Doyle on getting blue-collar support for a climate billhttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-29-pa-rep-doyle-on-getting-blue-collar-support-for-climate-bill/
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-29-pa-rep-doyle-on-getting-blue-collar-support-for-climate-bill/#respondWed, 30 Sep 2009 03:02:43 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-29-pa-rep-doyle-on-getting-blue-collar-support-for-climate-bill/]]>Rep. Mike Doyle chats with Grist.Photo: G20VoiceDuring last week’s G20 Summit in Pittsburgh, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) was out and about networking with climate-action advocates and talking up the city’s green cred. A southwestern Pennsylvania native, Doyle comes from a steelworking family and has been a friend to the industry during his nine years in Congress. But he’s also an outspoken proponent of the greening of Pittsburgh, where environmental cleanup, green jobs growth, energy-efficient building, and cleantech R&D have transformed a dying steel town into a lively pioneer of 21st century urban revitalization.

Doyle, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, was an early critic of the Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill. But he eventually emerged as a major supporter of the legislation, brokering components that would benefit the industrial and manufacturing sectors and whipping up votes that helped the bill squeak to passage in June. With Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), Doyle crafted a compromise measure that in the bill’s first 10 to 15 years would give away a mass of greenhouse-gas pollution credits to heavy industries facing intense overseas competition (such as steel, natch), as well as to power distribution companies serving local electric utilities.

While Doyle’s amendment angered some climate advocates, others feel he played a critical role in swaying enough of his fellow “Brown Dog Democrats” to pass the bill.

During the G20 last week, Doyle sat down for a quick chat with Grist about congressional climate politics, clean energy jobs, and the greening of Pittsburgh.

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Q.Let’s jump right in: From your perspective, what’s it going to take to get a carbon cap-and-trade measure through the Senate?

A. Hopefully the House bill hasn’t set the ceiling, and the Senate bill is going to set the floor.

It remains to be seen. The ultimate work is going to get done in the conference, as we put the House and the Senate bills together. I think the message we’re trying to convey to the Senate, and to others who were initially skeptical about whether this could be done in a way that didn’t devastate the economy, is that this can be a win-win situation.

Q.By win-win, you mean climate and economy, right? Your district is rich in coal and steel, and yet you brought many important constituents around to supporting the House climate and energy bill.

A. When this bill was first introduced in the House, I heard from the industries, and they were panicked that this was going to devastate the steel industry [and] jobs in western Pennsylvania.

I remember telling John Surma, the CEO of U.S. Steel, that he could either be at the table or on the menu. We were moving forward, and I wanted him to come to Washington, D.C., sit down with Ed Markey [D-Mass.] and Henry Waxman [D-Calif.] and those of us on the [Energy and Commerce] Committee, and talk about how reducing carbon emissions impacts his industry [in relation to] other countries that don’t have [climate] regimes yet and are his competitors, and how we could fashion legislation in such a way that we could have a win-win situation.

It was really out of those discussions that the Doyle-Inslee amendment [PDF] was born in the House, which basically says to our industries that if they become more efficient and lower their carbon footprints and do that better than the sector average, we would reward that, and we’d do it in a way that was WTO [World Trade Organization] compliant. We’re saying to steel, “We’ll give you the level playing field you need until such time that we get agreements with other countries that you’re competing with.”

Q.Being a hometown boy must have helped.

A. I get a certain amount of street cred, just ’cause I grew up here, and my dad and my grandpap — we’re a steel family. So it’s sort of like, “He wouldn’t screw us. He’s one of our guys.”

Q.The major competitor is China, which, as a developing nation, is not required to take on binding emission-reduction targets under the Kyoto climate treaty.

A. We’ve always had this debate in the Congress: “We don’t want to do anything ’til the Chinese do something.” For eight years, we had a president who said, “We’re not doing anything until the rest of the world does something.” And we did nothing.

Well, we all understand that America’s going to have to lead this; that when we lead, then it gives President Obama and future administrations the leverage they need to say to developing countries, “Join us.”

Q.I think it was surprising to many people beyond the Beltway that there was so much Democratic resistance to the Waxman-Markey bill.

A. It’s almost regional. [In] states like Pennsylvania and Ohio and West Virginia, where coal is king and supplies our electricity, we had to say, “How do we approach these early targets?” Our target is 80 percent reductions by the year 2050, but the toughest part is getting started.

Part of the strategy in the House bill was to mitigate some of these impacts early on, in areas that were coal-intensive, until we can get technologies on board to help them reduce emissions. Because under the early scheme, they’re not going to meet the caps, because there’s no carbon-capture-and-sequestration technology deployable as we speak today. So they’re going to have to buy credits. The theory [being promoted by opponents] is that they’re going to buy these credits and pass them right through to the ratepayers, and everybody’s going to pay more. We solved that problem in the bill.

Q.But there’s still a massive amount of misinformation going out to the American public about all of those measures.

A. No question. Last week, one of [Pittsburgh’s] two major papers did two editorials, one calling the whole idea of climate change “junk science,” and then just a few days later, saying how [climate legislation] could bankrupt this region. It gets hard to have a rational discussion with those people who think climate change is a hoax.

[But there are also] those people who think, “You know, I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. But just in case it is, we should err on the side of caution.” I think that’s where most western Pennsylvanians are. Not everybody hears Al Gore, but a lot of people are saying, “Hey, we’re talking about our kids and our grandkids. And if these people who say it’s a hoax are wrong, then we’ve really hurt the next generation.”

Q.Can people in your district picture a role for themselves in a low-carbon economy?

A. People that used to work in the mills come to me and say, “Mike, I didn’t go to college. I’m not a scientist at Carnegie Mellon. What does all this mean to a blue-collar guy?” And they start to see that as you build these wind turbines, there’s jobs for people at all different levels in this green economy. So people are slowly coming around.

We like to build stuff. That’s the other part that intrigues people from our part of the region. They want to work with their hands. People can get their heads around building solar panels and wind turbines.

That’s how a blue-collar kid that came from a steelworking family can go to Congress and support a clean-energy bill. Where a lot of people think this would be a natural “no” for me, it’s really become not only an easy “yes,” but something we can go back home and talk about.

Q.Some climate activists are arguing that the ethical dimension to climate change is getting lost in the economic cost-benefit analyses. Is that a case that would resonate with your voters, or voters in general?

A. The ethical argument verses the economic? You know, I don’t think so. Because people aren’t sure whether [climate change is] real or not. I think if they were sure, then the ethical argument would be a no-brainer; of course we have to do something. But since they are uncertain, the economic argument is really the only way to approach them.

It makes a compelling argument. I told a lot of my colleagues — and some of them are in tougher situations than I’m in — that I really think you can go back home, and this is something that people will understand, if you take the time to sit down and explain it to them.

Q.What’s your answer to people who say the government has no business mandating carbon pricing and green building standards?

A. We have building standards for earthquakes in the West Coast, and building standards for hurricanes in the East Coast. Why don’t we have building standards for having buildings that produce energy, instead of using so much energy? Because energy isn’t cheap any more.

Q.Going greener has helped Pittsburgh retain manufacturing jobs and revitalize the city’s economy — cleaning up brownfields, reclaiming the waterfront for the public, building green, and now bringing wind power jobs to the steel industry. What’s next?

We see this going on in our region, and we say, “Why shouldn’t Pittsburgh be the place where we do this kind of stuff, and produce these materials?” We’re starting to get our heads around these ideas of the future.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-29-pa-rep-doyle-on-getting-blue-collar-support-for-climate-bill/feed/0mike-doyle.jpgG20 cans fossil-fuel subsidies, but fails to make other climate-conserving moveshttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-25-g20-pledges-to-phase-out-fossil-fuel-subsidies/
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-25-g20-pledges-to-phase-out-fossil-fuel-subsidies/#respondSat, 26 Sep 2009 08:38:57 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-25-g20-pledges-to-phase-out-fossil-fuel-subsidies/]]>Let man tear asunder.On Friday afternoon, President Barack Obama formally announced that the world’s 20 major developed and developing nations had agreed to gradually eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies.

It was the only climate-specific policy directive to come out of the Group of 20 (G20) Summit in Pittsburgh, and it fell far short in the view of climate activists, who were hoping for a firm proposal on “climate finance” — G20 aid to poor nations for help in adapting to and mitigating climate change.

“Removing fossil-fuel subsidies could be an important step towards cutting CO2 emissions,” said Oxfam climate advisor David Waskow in a statement. “But it should not be allowed to distract from the failure of rich countries to offer poor countries the help they need. Poor people should not be asked to pay the price of cutting emissions” that rich countries have created.

Greenpeace climate finance advisor Steve Herz agreed. “We think it’s an important step forward,” said Herz, “but it’s no substitute for the work we expected them to be doing here, which was putting together a fair and ambitious financing package to help the world’s poorest nations.”

Despite the disappointment of activists, the commitment on the part of G20 leaders to cut fossil-fuel subsidies is an important step, assuming they follow through on their pledge. Fossil-fuel subsidies add up to around $300 billion across the G20 major world economies. Developing nations tend to use these subsidies to artificially lower fuel prices for consumers, while developed nations like the United States use them in the form of economic and tax sweeteners for fossil-fuel producers.

According to estimates from the International Energy Agency and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, eliminating the subsidies would reduce global greenhouse-gas pollution 10 to 12 percent by 2050.

“We already know that the prices [for fossil fuels] are too low because they don’t reflect the cost of climate change … the true scarcity value and opportunity cost of using this resource,” said Columbia University’s Scott Barrett, who studies natural resource economics. “These subsidies are sending the wrong signal about value and scarcity of fossil fuels in the marketplace.”

Fossil-fuel subsides are also a drag on the ecomony. “If you’re selling kerosene at a lower price than the world price … it will come out of the public purse in some other way,” said Barrett, who co-authored a survey of economic policy strategies for combating climate change — including the elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies — for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Second Assessment report, published in 1995 [PDF].

Removing artificial price supports will help cool demand for dirty fuels while simultaneously making cleaner energy more competitive. But it has to be done with care. if subsidies are cut off thoughtlessly, warned Barrett, a head of state could end up with riots in the streets.

This is one reason fossil-fuel subsidies have not played a bigger role in climate negotiations. Another, according to Barrett, is that many climate negotiators “were pushing for targets and timelines,” to the exclusion of all other options.

“The biggest problem with targets and timetables is that they’re not being met, they don’t work,” said Barrett. “So why not supplement discussions about targets and timetables with discussions about actions that are actually going to be taken” — like retiring fossil fuel subsidies, which looks like it may actually happen.

At the end of the Pittsburgh Summit, G20 heads of state directed their finance czars to begin developing a more detailed phaseout plan at a November meeting in Scotland. The G20 will revisit the issue at its next meeting, in Toronto in June 2010.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-25-g20-pledges-to-phase-out-fossil-fuel-subsidies/feed/0coal-money.jpgCoal and moneyG20 Voice logoClimate protesters hit the streets in Pittsburgh during G20 meetinghttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-25-climate-protesters-hit-streets-in-pittsburgh-during-g20-meeting/
Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:29:33 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-25-climate-protesters-hit-streets-in-pittsburgh-during-g20-meeting/]]>Young activists from the Avaaz Action Factory joined the mass “People’s March” into downtown Pittsburgh on Friday afternoon, not far from the site of the G20 Summit, after holding their own climate-focused march in the morning. Their Twitter-friendly slogan is “G20 Climate FAIL,” criticizing what they say has been a lack of action toward a global climate treaty. In particular, they believe President Obama is failing to show leadership on setting firm timelines and targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions.

Still, the Avaazians remain hopeful that a significant agreement will emerge from December’s international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen, and seemed happy to be part of the scene.

Specially designed to enable its wearer to withstand months of drought, fierce hurricanes, and catastrophic floods (it floats on water!), the SurvivaBall makes it unnecessary to transition to a low-carbon economy or finance adaptation for the world’s poor.

You can even dance in it! As for procreation between SurvivaBallists … well, the technology’s not quite there yet. But failure to enact a strong, effective climate treaty would create the market conditions needed to drive just that sort of innovation.

How can we ensure that SurvivaBall will be the solution the G20 focuses on for climate change? Encourage world leaders to think only of their nations’ narrow, short-term interests, leave firm commitments on emissions or humanitarian aid unspoken, and continue to support business-as-usual behavior in the energy, manufacturing, and transport sectors.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-24-survivaball-your-individual-climate-change-adaptation-strategy/feed/0Halliburton-suvivaball.jpgActor Djimon Hounsou wants to show the human costs of climate changehttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-24-actor-djimon-hounsou-wants-to-show-human-costs-of-climate-change/
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-24-actor-djimon-hounsou-wants-to-show-human-costs-of-climate-change/#respondFri, 25 Sep 2009 04:39:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-24-actor-djimon-hounsou-wants-to-show-human-costs-of-climate-change/]]>Djimon Hounsou at the U.N. Climate SummitPhoto: United NationsActor Djimon Hounsou is just as snacky in real life as he was on the big screen in Blood Diamond, The Island, and Gladiator. Better yet, he’s also a climate activist and humanitarian.

As a global ambassador for the aid and development group Oxfam, Hounsou has traveled in sub-Saharan Africa and seen the direct links between climate change and human suffering. “I’ve witnessed firsthand devastation with drought,” the Benin-born actor told reporters after he helped to kick off the U.N. Summit on Climate Change. “Year after year, [local farmers are] still expecting the rain to come pretty much as it used to. It’s not coming. So they have to adapt, with their crops and plantings.”

Not an easy proposition in a country like Mali, which Hounsou visited on a humanitarian mission. The average income in this Western African nation is about $3.29 a day.

Often the communities Hounsou travels to know that something has gone wrong, says Oxfam America President Ray Offenheiser. “We held a climate hearing in Ethiopia a week or so ago. One comment was … ‘For many many years, there were all varieties of birds here. And now the birds are gone.'”

Signs like this are signals of a “profound change” for these communities, Offenheiser says, even if “they don’t have all the information about what’s happening, why it’s happening, and what it means.”

“This is where the climate change story and the adaptation story become the human story,” he continued. “It’s about people, their lives, their livelihoods, and how they are going to change.”

One of the major points of gridlock in this year’s international climate-treaty negotiations is how the rich, industrialized nations are going to help the poorer developing nations adapt to and mitigate climate change — while also continuing to send over the aid and development dollars they already provide for a host of other reasons.

It is widely accepted now that the wealthy countries bear this responsibility; after all, they got fat and happy by creating the greenhouse-gas pollution that’s now slow-cooking the Earth. But how much help should developed nations offer? This is just one of the many contentious open questions to be addressed at December’s climate-treaty talks in Copenhagen.

Oxfam estimates that wealthy nations need to come up with around $50 billion a year to help poorer nations adapt to global warming, and about another $100 billion a year to finance low-carbon development, so that these countries can ameliorate poverty without taking a coal-and-oil-fueled path to prosperity.

Hounsou hopes that if the citizens of wealthy nations better grasp the human costs of climate change, they will pressure their leaders to ante up.

“We haven’t engaged the world population into this issue yet,” Hounsou says, noting that Western media in particular have not paid attention to the human component of global warming.

Still, “no matter how you look at it, developing nations have to initiate the discussion at Copenhagen,” he said.

Sens. Boxer and Kerry at a climate rally in June.Photo: David Pierpont, NWF via FlickrLast night at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, Teresa Heinz read a message from her husband, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), that set the gala crowd to cheering: He and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) will introduce a climate bill in the Senate next Wednesday.

The bill will be backed by a strong and broad coalition, according to Kerry’s message, which Heinz delivered at a pre-G20 party sponsored by the U.S. Climate Action Network, and “will take a more comprehensive approach to dwindling oil reserves than any prior legislation.”

The legislation will be a “thoughtful, innovative, far-reaching solution” in four areas: the nation’s energy foundation; U.S. economic competitiveness; the health of the environment; and national security.

In between sets by the cream of New Orleans jazz musicians, an upbeat Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) encouraged the crowd to stay optimistic about the prospects for a good international climate treaty to come out of December’s negotiations in Copenhagen. “We need to get the Senate to act,” said Doyle, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which produced the energy and climate bill tha the House passed in June.

“Let’s give President Obama some arrows in his quiver to take to Copenhagen,” Doyle said, suggesting that the Pittsburgh crowd remember to call Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) in the coming weeks and ask him to support the upcoming climate bill.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-24-boxer-kerry-will-introduce-senate-climate-bill-next-week/feed/0boxer-kerry-flickr-nwf_180x150.jpgSenators Boxer and Kerry to introduce the Senate climate billChina steals Cimate Week spotlight, but U.S. still in the hot seathttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-23-china-steals-climate-week-spotlight-us-still-in-hot-seat/
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-23-china-steals-climate-week-spotlight-us-still-in-hot-seat/#respondWed, 23 Sep 2009 23:07:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-23-china-steals-climate-week-spotlight-us-still-in-hot-seat/]]>U.N. headquarters: Site of all the inaction.Photo: United NationsThe U.S. was given a starring role at the United Nations Climate Summit on Tuesday, but China stole the show.

President Barack Obama had pride of place on the agenda, as the first head of state to speak to the gathered world leaders, ministers, and climate negotiators. His speech, which was warmly received, offered rhetorically forceful yet wholly general commentary about the huge risks posed by climate change and the need for action. Obama said nothing specific about what his nation was prepared to commit to in order to slash its emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Most of the speeches by other heads of state charted the same safe territory.

While Hu avoided talk of specific emissions reductions and stressed that developed countries should do more than their developing counterparts, his statements were the most definitive to date about what China is prepared to do to cut and compensate for its carbon emissions.

Humberto Rosa, Portugal’s secretary of state for environment, echoed that sentiment. “China has today given a little bit of leadership” among the developing nations “by giving solid numbers,” Rosa said.

Gore, Rosa, and others had similar praise for Japan’s new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who has pledged that his nation will cut emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

These new commitments from Asia’s powerhouses are putting real pressure on the U.S., as is the European Union’s willingness to commit to cuts of 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 if the U.S. will follow suit.

Meanwhile, small island nations — some of whose very existence is threatened by climate change — are also putting on all the pressure they can.

This past summer, the world’s major economies announced a goal of keeping overall surface warming of the Earth by 2100 to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has challenged the global community [PDF] to keep overall surface warming well below 1.5 degrees C, which would mean even greater cuts than the most ambitious treaty proposals made so far.

A treaty that settles for anything less would spell disaster for island nations, in the view of Dean Bialek, U.N. representative for the nonprofit group Independent Diplomat, who is advising and assisting the AOSIS nations in the climate treaty negotiations. “[It] would mean complete inundation and statelessness,” says Bialek. “That’s a morally repugnant outcome, and totally unacceptable.”

But despite China, despite Japan, despite the European Union, most observers agree that it will all come down to what the U.S. is prepared to do. “A firm commitment from the U.S. would make the dominoes fall into place,” Bialek says.

“With the change in administration in the U.S., everyone believed that a strong deal was forthcoming,” Bialek continued. “Hopes have dimmed a bit due to the mixed signals coming from Washington.”

Portugal’s Rosa says the E.U. still trusts that President Obama wants to fight global warming, but worries that America’s domestic political process could derail this year’s international treaty talks.

“The American people and the Senate are the real actors now,” Rosa says. “We’re sure the United States will get there, but we’ll be sorry if it’s not in time for Copenhagen.”

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-23-china-steals-climate-week-spotlight-us-still-in-hot-seat/feed/0un-headquarters-nyc.jpgClimate Week NYC logoClimate Voice logoPeople pressure is key to action on climate change, say two climate movement leadershttp://grist.org/article/2009-09-21-people-pressure-key-to-action-on-climate-change/
http://grist.org/article/2009-09-21-people-pressure-key-to-action-on-climate-change/#respondTue, 22 Sep 2009 12:43:37 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-21-people-pressure-key-to-action-on-climate-change/]]>Kumi NaidooKumi Naidoo and Lord Nicholas Stern couldn’t be more different when it comes to climate action. One is chair of a worldwide citizen activist coalition; the other an economist and academic.

But each is a cautious optimist when it comes to international action on climate change: While it may not be probable that world leaders will forge a strong international climate treaty this year, it’s still possible. And citizen pressure is the key.

One day before the United Nations’ day-long Climate Summit on Sept. 22–which features President Obama’s hotly anticipated first address to the U.N.–Naidoo sat down to talk with journalists and bloggers about the global tcktcktck campaign, a coalition of several global non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The name tcktcktck is meant to evoke the sound of a clock ticking down to December’s international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen. The group has been organizing periodic citizen activist “mobilizations” around the world, featuring creative street performance–style protests coordinated via online social-media tools.

The worldwide citizen actions, including Sept. 21’s Global Climate Wake-up Call, have been timed to coincide with major climate and economic meetings around the world. Ever the optimist, Naidoo believes that “if the mobilization really peaks in the coming weeks … then the momentum could shift considerably.”

Naidoo acknowledges that expectations among both negotiators and activists about the likely outcome of the December talks are growing increasingly pessimistic. Even so, he believes that there’s still time to create a different outcome. “If we can change the context of the political world” by turning out hundreds or thousands of people to demand climate action, he says, “we know that failure to act will be an electoral liability for a lot of nations.”

Turning out citizens is also crucial for the civil-society campaigners who will be at Copenhagen, he says, to prove that there’s a sizable global constituency in support of strong action on global warming. “Otherwise, why should any of these leaders listen to us? We have to show that citizens are behind us.”

Asked about what American climate advocates, in particular, could be doing in coming weeks, Naidoo acknowledged that the battle over health-care reform has sucked up most of the nation’s political oxygen. As a result, he said, “the first challenge is to be able to open up some space,” and refuse to accept that climate legislation cannot progress until health care is resolved.

He believes that American climate campaigners might pry open that space by allying more closely with the city and state governments that enacted progressive climate policies during the “last eight years of Bush administration denialism” about global warming.

He also advises climate advocates to make their arguments in plainer language for citizens who may not know a lot about the issues, and to revamp their media strategies. “My reading of the U.S. is that, insofar that you can call it a democracy, it’s an electronic democracy,” says Naidoo. “What people hear on talk radio, what they see on mainstream TV channels … part of the campaign here has to be getting smarter about penetrating the media that has the ability to shape national consciousness,” even if that means getting down and dirty with Fox News.

“If I was in the U.S. right now,” said Naidoo, “I would find 10 of the most well-endowed financial folks who get it, and ask them to put serious money on the table for a serious media effort. Take the thing to a different level.”

A Stern talking-to

Sir Nicholas SternLater in the day, Lord Nicholas Stern expressed a similar guarded optimism on global climate action before an audience of academics and students at Columbia University.

Stern, who famously quipped that climate change is “the biggest market failure in financial history,” is the author of an influential 2006 report on the economic implications of climate change. In it, he predicted that while it is possible to significantly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the coming years, it will not be cheap. He estimated the cost to be around 2 percent of the world’s annual gross domestic product (GDP). But on the plus side, grappling successfully with global warming would open up unprecedented opportunities for ending poverty and creating sustainable economic growth, he argues.

“I think this is a story of investment opportunity,” Stern said on Monday — specifically, investments in new technologies that will cut across the whole of the global economy and create “the most dynamic period of economic growth that we’ve probably seen in the whole of economic history.” Not to mention the fact that sufficient reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions mean significantly less risk of the massive droughts and floods that displace millions, escalate conflicts over food and other resources, and intensify world poverty.

According to Stern, the two key challenges of this century are overcoming poverty in the next 20 to 30 years, and managing climate change in order to slash emissions from 2020 onwards. “It’s quite clear from the structure of both problems that you have to act on them now,” he says.

And like Kumi Naidoo, Lord Nicholas Stern believes that political leaders will be best motivated to act on climate change when they are held accountable by their own citizens.

Around 30 people gathered at Union Square in Manhattan at 12:18 pm on Monday to make simultaneous cell-phone calls to President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, asking them to support a strong international treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and stop global warming. The event, organized via text messaging, was part of a global Climate Wake-up Call to world leaders, with similar gatherings happening at 12:18 PM local time in more than 2200 locales in 128 nations.

Many of the callers at Union Square encountered busy signals and full voice mailboxes — suggesting that calls were being made from hundreds of similar “flash mobs” up and down the East Coast at the same time.

The time is symbolic of the date December 18 — the last day of this year’s international climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen.

2009: The year so many met so often to talk so much about the perilous state of the climate — and as of September, accomplished so little. Will this week be the charm?

During several different international meetings this year, nations have been getting into position for this December’s international climate treaty talks in Copenhagen.

This week, they’re all gathering again. On Tuesday, the U.N. is holding a day-long Climate Summit (alongside its annual, two-week General Assembly) in New York City. And on Thursday and Friday, the Group of 20 (G20) leading world economies is gathering in Pittsburgh, its third meeting of the year to deal with the global economic meltdown.

While climate is not formally on the G20’s agenda, some are hoping that President Obama will come off his speech at the New York event ready to signal to other world leaders that the U.S. will lead on forging a strong replacement to the Kyoto Protocol treaty to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, which expires in 2013. Its successor is supposed to be largely finalized at December’s global-warming talks.

New York City is playing host to climate week.How likely is Obama to do that? As the Magic 8-Ball might say, “Reply hazy; try again.”

Candidate Obama made strong climate action a central plank of his election platform. President Obama has taken some pragmatic steps to make good on those promises, such as naming a climate-savvy team to key environment- and energy-related posts. Obama also backed the massive funding within the stimulus bill for home-weatherization programs, clean energy research and development, expansion of rail transit, and other on-the-ground moves toward a low-carbon energy economy. And he spent a smidge of political capital to help get the House climate and energy bill passed in June.

On the international negotiating front, however, the Obama administration may be hamstrung by sluggish Senate progress on passing climate legislation. Senate leaders keep pushing back the timetable for action on a bill, with Majority Leader Harry Reid suggesting last week that it could be bumped all the way to next year. Republicans are almost universally opposed to a cap-and-trade system for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions, and many moderate Democrats aren’t enthusiastic about cap-and-trade either.

If the Senate doesn’t pass a climate bill by early December, U.S. influence in Copenhagen may well be diminished, though if the EPA takes action to regulate greenhouse gases with its existing authority, that could give the Obama administration something to take the table.

Meanwhile, the administration is working toward a bilateral climate agreement, which could circumvent the Kyoto treaty framework. Where the world’s two greatest greenhouse-gas polluters lead, the rest of the world will probably have to follow, no matter how strong or weak the results may be.

Climate activists are not going to let this week’s gatherings of nations pass without a demonstration — or even several thousand demonstrations, all around the world — to show global public demand for a strong international climate treaty. So there’s a heavy schedule of (hoped-for) flash mobs, protests, call-to-arms film screenings, and other events in both New York City and Pittsburgh.

Through its Voices Project, the international aid group Oxfam and allies are helping a number of non-mainstream-media reporters and bloggers (including this reporter-blogger) to attend the Climate Summit; get face time with big names in climate policy, politics, and activism; and cover the G20 from a perspective that puts global warming front and center, instead of off to the side of the recession or global trade policy.

So, let’s set the scene: Coming into this week’s meetings, the U.S. and 16 other of the world’s largest emitters have already made a commitment (at July’s Major Economies Forum in Italy) to hold global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. They also reiterated a goal from last year of “achieving at least a 50 percent reduction in global emissions by 2050,” with industrialized nations slashing their greenhouse-gas pollution by 80 percent. But as of yet, the 17 nations have made no formal plan for how to get to any of these milestones.

Will this week’s events help break through the logjam? Stay tuned as we find out.

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-09-20-climate-week-kicks-off-in-new-york-with-bigwigs-and-big-hopes/feed/0new-york-city-skyline.jpgClimate Week NYC logoNew York City skylineClimate Voice logoNAACP resolves to fight climate changehttp://grist.org/article/2009-07-21-naacp-resolves-to-fight-climate-change/
http://grist.org/article/2009-07-21-naacp-resolves-to-fight-climate-change/#respondWed, 22 Jul 2009 10:03:03 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-07-21-naacp-resolves-to-fight-climate-change/]]>The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People celebrated its centennial last week by jumping into the policy debate over global warming. Delegates at the storied civil rights organization’s annual meeting in New York voted to adopt a resolution supporting clean energy development, curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and policies to foster green collar jobs.

Dale Charles of NAACP’s Arkansas chapter was a leader in getting the climate change resolution approved by the civil rights organization.Photo courtesy Dale Charles“This is a policy that was passed unanimously at our convention,” said Hilary O. Shelton, the director of NAACP’s Washington, D.C., bureau.

According to Shelton, the association will be making climate change policy a priority in coming weeks and months, at both the grassroots and federal levels. “With this new resolution, this gives us even more emphasis to push our units to be more actively engaged,” he said, by getting educated on the issues, meeting with legislators, writing op-eds for local newspapers, and more.

With about twice as many blacks as whites out of work across the nation, 25 percent of the nation’s 41 million blacks living below the poverty line, and 20 percent lacking health insurance, issues like rising energy costs, curbing air pollution, and creating green collar jobs are not abstract issues.

“African Americans have been disproportionately affected by pollution, from water, to toxic waste being dumped in our communities, to air quality,” said Dale Charles, president of the NAACP’s Arkansas chapter, whose Little Rock branch sponsored the climate change measure. “This resolution will help establish policies to eliminate or slow down that process of putting those types of elements in our environment, where our people have to live and our children have to breathe.”

NAACP is taking on global warming in partnership with the National Wildlife Federation. When it comes to climate change, this 73-year old, 4-million-member strong bastion of the mainstream environmental movement is better identified with polar bears stranded on melting icebergs than with communities of color fighting against air pollution, or for jobs programs.

But there’s no inherent contradiction in the alliance, said Marc C. Littlejohn, NWF’s manager of diversity partnerships. “Communities of color are normally, when it comes to global warming, the first and worst impacted.”

Colombia Law professor Ted Shaw noted that the NAACP is hardly new to tackling environmental issues. “The NAACP has been involved in environmental justice issues,” said Shaw, who litigated such cases during his 20-odd years with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a separate but allied organization. “This is ratcheting [that] up.”

Judging from some of the coverage of last week’s convention in the mainstream media, there is a widespread debate that the NAACP’s political relevance may be fading. “A century ago, when the NAACP was founded, black America was under siege — lynchings were common, race riots had rocked major cities and Jim Crow segregation was being codified throughout the South. Today, all of that is fast-receding history,” wrote Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. “Some critics have wondered whether there is still a role for an organization like the NAACP.”

Shaw said he thinks the association, which has a membership of just over half a million, can still have a lot of influence when it wants to.

“I think that the membership, the level of consciousness of the membership, is probably similar to the consciousness of most Americans” about global warming, he says. Some people think it’s a significant problem, and some people don’t. But “when the NAACP as an organization decides to make this priority,” says Shaw, “the rank and file members will have a much higher consciousness of it, and will get behind it.

“I’m not telling you that this is the 1960s, and it has the prominence it had in the civil rights movement,” Shaw said. “But it’s a group that periodically flexes its muscles — and it can be formidable.”

Dale Charles is confident that the association can have a big impact on climate legislation. “NAACP, through its hundred years of advocacy, our longstanding work in human rights and civil rights — we have a track record, the ability to mobilize people across the country and address certain issues and make our voices heard,” he said.

Charles would like to hear some raised voices when it comes to targeting federal recovery dollars to jobs for African Americans. “In my state we’re going to spend millions on highway construction,” he said. “We don’t have black firms big enough to bid on those projects. So none of that money is going to come back to the black community.”

Obama needs to wake up to this situation, said Charles. “Right now it seems to be that the same people who had control of the money before are going to have control of this money,” he said. “It’s not going to trickle down to Main Street the way Barack Obama intended. Green jobs won’t get to African Americans if business as usual continues.”

Shelton agreed. “When we talk about climate change, we also have to talk about how strategies, programs, and initiatives that are being implemented to address problems of climate change are also very sensitive to the issues of people who live on Back Street” but aspire to become solid middle class residents of Main Street. “Those are NAACP’s constituents,” he said.

Until people perceived the living-wage job opportunities inherent in transitioning to a low-carbon economy, said Shelton, conservation issues were often framed as having to give something up. “Are you going let a company come in that was going to pollute the air, pollute the ground, and probably pollute the water? But they’re going to bring 400 new jobs that pay a living wage? That was the framing: you sacrifice for a clean environment and don’t have jobs, or you have the jobs and sacrifice the environment?”

But now the solutions to climate change and to African-American poverty are coalescing. “Now, we can say yes to the creation of new forms of energy, jobs that maintain those new forms of energy, yes to clean air, yes to jobs that pay a fair wage and include health insurance,” Shelton said.

Green collar jobs will include manufacturing jobs in hybrid automobiles and renewable energy, as well as weatherizing homes and other skilled service professions, Littlejohn said. But equal priority must be given to cultivating new generations of black professionals, “getting college students to invest in jobs that are going to be more productive or innovative for clean energy: engineering, architecture and LEED certification.”

The NAACP’s resolution urges lawmakers “to ensure that the response to climate change can take a higher ground than business as usual – one that ensures that we capture real public benefits from the new energy economy.”

Given the iffy prospects for strong carbon-capping legislation in the Senate, the time has come for a more colorful grassroots climate coalition.

“I’m happy that this is not an issue that people will continue to see as one of these white liberal causes that doesn’t connect to their lives,” says Shaw. “Because this issue is connected to all of our lives. Climate change doesn’t know anything about segregation.”

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-07-21-naacp-resolves-to-fight-climate-change/feed/0naacp_logo.jpgDale CharlesThis White House science adviser thinks America should embrace nuclear powerhttp://grist.org/article/2009-06-12-obama-adviser-nuclear-power/
http://grist.org/article/2009-06-12-obama-adviser-nuclear-power/#respondSat, 13 Jun 2009 00:32:21 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-12-obama-adviser-nuclear-power/]]>There are 104 commercial nuclear power stations in the United States today, supplying about 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. No new commercial reactors have been licensed here since 1973. And the last commercial plant to come online, Watts Bar in Tennessee, powered up more than a decade ago, in 1996.

Jackson was a researcher in the prestigious Bell Laboratories earlier in her career. She chaired the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Clinton administration, and now heads Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

If the United States is serious about realizing an energy supply that’s invulnerable to geopolitics or price shocks, and also wants to stop global warming, says Jackson, “then you’re talking about having to look at sources of energy that have less of an effect in terms of carbon growth, carbon dioxide emissions.” She believes part of that energy mix must be nuclear power.

“However well we do on energy efficiency, there’s going to be a need for a lot more electricity,” agrees Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace U.K. from 2001 to 2008. Nuclear power “is a bridge technology” for the next 30 to 40 years, he says. Going nuclear in the medium term would give the world time to build out the capacity of clean energy technologies, while also slashing greenhouse-gas pollution.

Jackson expresses optimism that scientific and technological innovation can help reduce the risks of nuclear power (although she doesn’t suggest when that will be achieved).

Tindale does not: “In the short term, I don’t think there are technological improvements in the performance of nuclear power stations,” he says. “And the spent fuel from the new generation will be as dangerous, and some would argue even more dangerous, than the spent fuel from existing power stations.”

But “there is a case for another generation of nuclear power stations,” he says, “solely based on mitigating climate change.”

Jackson and Tindale will be part of an evening panel this Saturday at the World Science Festival in New York City, exploring whether or not nuclear power can be part of the solution to an ever-hotter planet.

***

Thirty years ago, memories of the oil shocks of the early 1970s were fading, and an anti-nuclear power movement was gaining ground. Then three things happened that dealt U.S. nuclear power a near-TKO.

First, in early March 1979, the movie “The China Syndrome” offered up a gritty, post-Watergate vision of a corporate cover-up of a near-accident at a California nuclear power plant, featuring heroic TV journalists, a Deep Throat-type whistleblower, and corrupt, cynical government regulators.

And in September 1979, a powerhouse array of American rock stars — including The Doobie Brothers, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen — united to perform before capacity crowds at the “No Nukes” concerts in New York City. An album and concert documentary followed within a year.

All these factors united to effectively kibosh America’s nuclear power industry. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) put nuclear power plant approvals on ice for over a year after the Three Mile Island accident. By the time it was possible once again to propose new nukes, it no longer made economic or public relations sense to try.

Cut to 2009: Even with the economic meltdown, electricity demand is expected to increase over the next four decades in the United States, where around 50 percent of the electricity is generated by coal-fired plants. But burning coal pours millions of tons of climate-disrupting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we now have a president who has put coping with the dangers of climate change high on his list of policy priorities.

With legislation to cap and charge for carbon emissions wending its way through Congress, supported by a popular president and his dream team of green advisers, the business case for coal-fired power is weakening almost by the day. So, should virtually carbon-free nuclear replace coal power?

Jackson professes disinterest in these kinds of politicized scenarios, instead stressing the need to deal with the bigger picture. “What we need is a comprehensive energy security roadmap, a comprehensive strategy. There is no one silver bullet; there has to be a combination of options for addressing our energy needs.”

Jackson, who’s long been an educator, embraces events like the World Science Festival to help solve these energy questions. “We need to build public understanding and support for the range of energy and environmental actions that must be taken,” she says. “[P]rograms like the World Science Festival … contribute to advancing this kind of agenda, because it expands by definition the public dialogue on the issues.”

Tindale has founded a project called Climate Answers, which aims to shift the energy debate “onto what we should be in favor of, rather than what we should be against,” he says. “[It’s] based on the premise that controlling climate change will make us happier, healthier and richer.”

When activists oppose projects like the Yucca Mountain storage facility for spent nuclear fuel, he believes they ought to take a hard look at their priorities. “If they’re doing it on the grounds that they think there’s a better way for storing nuclear fuel, that is reasonable.”

“But if they’re doing it simply because … they don’t want any more nuclear power stations,” says Tindale, “then they have to think very seriously whether it’s better in their view to have spent nuclear fuel, or massive greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired power stations?”

]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-06-12-obama-adviser-nuclear-power/feed/0know-nukes-463-394.jpgLow-income nabes lead the way in urban farminghttp://grist.org/article/brooklyns-hopeful-gardeners/
http://grist.org/article/brooklyns-hopeful-gardeners/#respondSat, 14 Jun 2008 02:18:06 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=23994]]>The Garden of Hope — the new community green space I covered this week on Grist — is just one facet of Brooklyn’s community gardening scene.

While writing this story I spoke with Susan Fields of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge program, which reaches out to neighborhoods all over Brooklyn to encourage and to support many levels of gardening — from the “Greenest Block in Brooklyn” contest all the way to the Urban Composting Project. “There’s a growing focus on urban food production,” she told me.

In the Red Hook waterfront neighborhood, for instance, the group Added Value transformed a broken-down playground into a vibrant, 2.75-acre farm that today trains children and teenagers to grow food from seed and sell it at a twice-weekly local farmers market. Over in East New York, a neighborhood in eastern Brooklyn where most of the residents live below the poverty line, East New York Farms grows thousands of pounds of produce a year, hosts a CSA, and supports the development of the East New York Farmers’ Market, which features produce from 23 local gardens and three regional farmers. Both gardens teach youth about ethical business, teamwork, and civic values — as well as agriculture.

And not far from the Garden of Hope, Bed-Stuy residents grow fruits, vegetables and medicinal herbs in the 0.8-acre Hattie Carthan Community Garden, where regular events include cooking demonstrations, nutrition classes, and food security discussions. The garden was a stop on a recent United Nations sustainable food tour.

These urban farms strike me as responses to at least a couple anxieties of our era: Wondering where the food we eat comes from, and worrying about whether it’s safe (see Tom Philpott’s coverage of this week’s salmonella-in-tomatos scare).

It’s not coincidental that urban ag efforts often take off in some of Brooklyn’s historically least-privileged neighborhoods, Fields told me. “There’s also a growing awareness of the health crises that are concentrated in certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn around obesity, asthma, and other food related problems,” she said. “They need to have access to fresh food, to healthy food … And when that’s not available for purchase … a lot of these community gardens, in the spirit of community gardening, are taking this problem in their own hands.”

It’s got all the signs of a bad breakup: anger, recriminations, and friends taking sides. But this rift doesn’t involve bitter former sweeties; it’s between members of one of the nation’s largest and most influential environmental groups. And it’s happening in a high-profile, wealthy state with complex environmental problems, where the stakes are much higher than who gets the DVD collection.

On March 25, the national board of directors of the Sierra Club voted to suspend its Florida chapter for four years — an unprecedented move for an organization with a long tradition of democratic management from the grassroots up. The move meant the immediate ouster of the state chapter’s 27-member executive committee — which had been elected by Florida Sierra Club members to oversee statewide activist efforts and manage paid staff — plus the suspension of other state-level committees.

The Florida chapter will not be able to elect state-level leaders for the duration of the suspension. It’s a partial disenfranchisement of 35,000 members, around 5 percent of the Sierra Club’s national membership, who contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to the group in annual dues alone — and likely a whole lot more, considering that the state has many wealthy and environmentally concerned residents. During the suspension, the Florida chapter’s statewide conservation agenda will be in the hands of an interim steering committee, which is being drawn from the Florida membership by a selection committee hand-picked by the Club’s national board.

The situation could be seen as just another ugly falling-out within a green group were it not for Florida’s prominence in the environmental movement and in the Electoral College. The state has a wealth of mediagenic conservation causes: protecting the habitat of the critically endangered Florida panther (charismatic megafauna); fighting oil drilling off the popular beaches of the Gulf coast (charismatic human cuties in bikinis and Speedos); and, of course, restoring the Everglades (charismatic swampland). Add in the fact that Florida is once again poised to play a controversial role in a presidential contest, and you’ve got a lot of eyeballs on the state.

Are Not!

The Sierra Club’s national board says the suspension was necessary because years of infighting debilitated Florida’s executive committee and spilled over into local groups across the state, hampering the chapter’s conservation work and alienating many of the members. The ousted leaders, of course, have a different perspective.

Karen Orr, the Florida chapter’s former political chair, says the charges of factionalism and divisiveness within the executive committee were “completely fabricated.” She calls the national board’s review process “real star chamber proceedings.”

Orr claims the chapter’s leadership has been punished because it took positions counter to those of the national Sierra Club, including the national organization’s pro-biofuels stance. “[Biofuels] would be a disaster in Florida,” says Orr. “We have extreme drought, and extreme pressures on us in Florida from development and agriculture.”

Both Orr and Joy Ezell, the chapter’s former conservation chair, say the Florida chapter was also targeted for opposing the national board’s endorsement of a new line of home cleaning products from the Clorox Company. The Sierra Club is allowing Clorox to use the Club’s logo on its “Green Works” line, and it’s getting an undisclosed amount of funding from Clorox as part of the deal. The Florida chapter denounced the partnership in a formal resolution in January, noting that Clorox has a history of violating environmental laws and producing damaging chemical products.

“I guess they saw us as a rogue group who were running amok and making stands stronger than the national positions,” Ezell says.

Former chapter secretary Pedro Monteiro also disputes the allegation that infighting on the executive committee was paralyzing the Florida chapter. In an email sent to the national Sierra Club before the suspension was finalized, he tallied up the committee’s recent votes and reported that “95 percent of over 220 motions voted on in 2006-2007 were decided by at least a 2:1 margin,” and 63 percent were unanimous. “For a 27-member committee, that’s impressive. It certainly is not indicative of ‘deep divisions.'”

These former leaders are furious about the national board’s move, and they’re not mincing words. Writing on the website CounterPunch, Orr and former chapter chair Betsy Roberts call the suspension “the March 25th Massacre” and accuse Sierra Club’s “national bureaucracy” of removing the state leadership in order to take direct control of the chapter’s funds and programs.

Monteiro’s rhetoric is even more heated. “This suspension process is rife with the same problems that plagued the misguided invasion of Iraq and Panama, and the illegal holding of citizens in Guantanamo Bay,” he wrote in his email, comparing the board’s actions to “the crimes of the Bush Administration.” He continued, “If there really are problems in the Florida Chapter, allow the voters to express their will and elect a new leadership at the next regularly held election.” In a follow-up email, Monteiro called the chapter’s new interim steering committee “a national staff-appointed junta.”

Robert Cox.

Are Too!

“The Florida situation has been terribly unprecedented,” says Robert Cox, chair of the Sierra Club’s national board, which is elected by all of the club’s members. “It’s the first time in our 116-year history that we’ve suspended a chapter. A few of the ousted leaders have been quite angry and taken their case to the media. But I can’t emphasize enough that a majority of Florida members were saying [that] things are bad enough to suspend the chapter.”

Cox says the suspension was unrelated to the Florida chapter’s positions on biofuels, Clorox Green Works, or any other issue. He notes that the national board’s investigation into tensions within the Florida chapter began in 2006, long before the Club began discussing a partnership with Clorox. The investigation went on for more than a year and included attempts at mediated conflict resolution and a 60-day comment period during which Florida members were invited to offer their opinions via phone, email, and postal mail. To avert fears of retaliation, members were assured that their comments would be kept private.

According to Cox, Floridians reported that factionalism among state leaders had led to secret meetings, fixed elections, and retribution against local leaders who disagreed with members of the executive committee. “There seemed to be a group of leaders who could not get along,” says Cox. “Chapters routinely have debates and disagreements, which are normally settled within the chapters. Here it seemed more embittered, and threatened the chapter’s ability to function in any effective way.”

The majority of Florida members who expressed a preferred course of action supported the suspension, Cox says.

What’s Clorox Got to Do With It?

Despite Cox’s denial, a number of activists still maintain that the chapter’s suspension was retaliation for the anti-Clorox resolution. This view was publicized in an essay about the situation by Sierra Club member Peter Montague, published in the March 27 edition of the online newsletter “Rachel’s Democracy and Health News” and linked to or reprinted by many blogs and websites, including Grist’s own Gristmill.

But Club members in Florida certainly aren’t the only ones speaking out against putting the Sierra Club logo on Clorox Green Works products. “There was a lot of grassroots dissatisfaction over [the Clorox deal],” says James Lane, secretary of the New York City Group of Sierra Club, who opposes the endorsement. “I don’t think it’s credible that [the national leadership would] suspend a chapter for speaking out against it.”

Lane speaks as someone who has his own contentious history with the national board. In the early 1990s, Lane and other leaders of the New York City Group of the Sierra Club took the Club to court — and won — after it supported their suspension by the New York State chapter. Although he discounts the Clorox angle, Lane is critical of the Florida suspension, especially its four-year duration. The New York City Group was suspended for one year, he notes. Many of the former leaders waited out the year and were eventually re-elected to their positions. Is the national board trying to avoid a similar scenario in Florida?

Says Cox, “If we are succeeding in rebuilding the [Florida] chapter [and] people are getting along, we could end the suspension much sooner. Also, quite frankly, New York City … taught us something: that the leaders need a little longer period of cooling off.”

Take a Deep Breath, Everybody

Alan Farago, a newspaper columnist and former chair of the Club’s Miami Group, doesn’t believe the suspension of the Florida chapter was a coup by national leaders. “There’s a lot of mischaracterizing … that national is trying to step on the grassroots,” he says.

Farago doesn’t come down firmly on one side or the other of the suspension, but suggests that Florida’s complex political and environmental situation contributed to problems in the state’s Sierra Club chapter. “Everything is more aggravated in Florida: wilderness, water quality, suburban sprawl, marine ecosystems, wetlands, and the whole host of battles with regulatory agencies,” he says.

“Florida was very much the test tube for the Bush White House in terms of developing strategies to lower regulatory thresholds, to diminish citizen involvement, and to promote this kind of laissez-faire so-called free-market capitalism that is such a complete disaster in terms of the housing boom,” Farago continues. “Over quite a long period of time, the grassroots part of the environmental movement in Florida has been marginalized, by pressures both internal and external.” These pressures created what he terms a “very unhealthy insularity” in the Florida chapter’s leadership.

Craig Diamond of Tallahassee is one Floridian who attests to being squeezed out by the now-former leaders — in his case, from a long-held Sierra Club seat on a state research board. “If you weren’t a loyal member of the team and didn’t pass some sort of litmus test, you were going to be cast off,” he says. He claims the infighting damaged the Club’s standing with other eco-activists in the state. “I know for a fact that the chapter became disinvited from a number of efforts on various conservation fronts.”

Diamond points out that even with the Sierra Club’s grassroots democratic tradition and nonprofit status, the national board has both the right and the legal responsibility to step in if it uncovers mismanagement. “The stakes were too high here to let this persist the way it had been for much longer,” he says.

Diamond believes there are many Sierra Club members in Florida who will become more active now that “the tenor of the chapter” is changing. “There are still people who would like to contribute, who’ll come back to try and right the ship.”

The Florida chapter now has four years to kiss and make up. If the suspension lasts its full duration, the chapter’s members will next mark their ballots for state leaders in 2012 — just as the nation’s attention again turns to Florida’s electoral votes during a presidential election year.

]]>http://grist.org/article/trouble-in-paradise/feed/0tropStorm_f-millzero_h528.jpgFinance, energy, and the environment: markets and opportunitieshttp://grist.org/article/fly-on-the-wall-street/
http://grist.org/article/fly-on-the-wall-street/#respondSat, 26 Apr 2008 07:11:49 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=23068]]>Last night, I went to a panel at the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street (no, really!) on what’s financially hot or soon will be in non-coal, non-oil energy technologies. I love these kinds of events; typically, what comes of them is reality-based information, dealing with who has the money, where it’s going (or ought to go), and what will get it there, in order to transform our energy system. I come away from these things more hopeful than from any number of political rallies, because these are people who are walking their talk instead of posing in their Rogan jeans and “Save the planet” t-shirts.

The panel was co-sponsored by Sierra Club, so the articulate Carl Pope was one of the speakers, natch. The other speakers were Pete Cartwright, CEO of Advanced Power Projects, Inc.; Daniel Abbasi, head of regulatory and public policy research for MissionPoint Capital Partners (“Financing transition to carbon free economy”); Michael Molnar, VP at Goldman Sachs, responsible for alt. energy and coal sectors in the Energy & Materials Equity Research Business Unit; and moderator Myron Kandel, founding financial editor at CNN.

Abbasi: We see right now the challenge as a commercialization and diffusion problem, not an innovation problem … Example: Sun Edison — biz model innovation, not new tech. Wal-Mart is now a client — let us borrow your roof, we’ll put the solar power panels on them, maintain them, you’ll have solar power and some price guarantees. Diffusion is the key at this point, not invention.

Pope: With a new president, we get a new opportunity but not a solution. League of Conservation Voters survey: counted all questions asked of all candidates this year by 14 Sunday talk show hosts and other pundits — 3,500 odd questions in total. Five had to do with energy and global warming. 42 about haircuts.

No one’s asked these candidates what they’ll do. If we don’t improve the quality of American citizenship, we will not improve quality of American leadership. But that said, the candidates are willing to talk about it, but the media won’t ask.

Molnar: [on companies touting green credibility] Information is not in the graphic of green or green brand statement. Look at company’s 10K to see how much money the company is making on green tech. Magnitude of problem: you need to see companies making money to stimulate investment. When there’s an eco incentive and people can make money, that’s the scenario where you can have positive change. A lot rests on government policies and subsidies.

Cartwright: Yes, incentives are important. But energy industry moves very slowly. If we invented the perfect clean tech today, it wouldn’t make a significant contribution for 20 years. So I think we have to go with the tech we currently have available, and I think yes, a recession might hurt [our progress].

There are 8 million stories in the Mississippi Basin, and this week we’ve told only a few. As lead editor of this Army Corps series, I’ve been immersed for the last few months in all things Mississippi River. Coming out the other side, I have a few answers, yes, but even more questions to explore. Below is my personal working list of issues that — while perhaps less acknowledged nationally than the spectacular disaster that is New Orleans and the Louisiana coast — rank high in determining a bright or dim future for the Mississippi Basin’s communities, both human and wild.

It makes one hell of a neighbor.

Photo: nasa.gov

1. Living with RiskIn New York City, most of us have installed bars across our windows and double locks on our doors. New Yorkers tend not to forget that living here, there’s a relatively high risk someone will try to break into our homes and steal our stuff — and no one tells us otherwise. We’re not special, of course: many Californians live with the ever-present risk of earthquakes, and design buildings to increase the chances they’ll survive the next one. In other parts of the West, officials urge homeowners to build, landscape, and maintain properties in ways that will help protect them from wildland fires.

But it’s different for people living and working behind the levees of greater St. Louis, of New Orleans, and of other flood-prone spots on the Mississippi. They have been assured for generations that they are safe — and much of the time, that’s true. In many locations, they are not expected to build differently to account for the (arguably) rare one-in-a-hundred flood. However, it’s the exceptions — violent, life-altering exceptions — that prove the inherent risks of setting up life behind a levee.

Isn’t it time for residents and their representatives to change their ways to account for these periodic, and largely predictable, weather events? In some places, that’s happening. When residents of Biloxi, Miss., climb the stairs of rebuilt homes set on nine-foot pilings above the ground, they likely won’t forget that they’re living in the path of future Hurricane Katrinas.

2. Who’s Mitigating Whom?Should the same federal agency — the Army Corps of Engineers — be responsible for not only planning and building Mississippi Basin flood protections, but assessing how much environmental damage those projects will cause, fixing up that damage, and reporting back to Congress on how well all that went? And all from the same budget? “The Corps’ goal is to actually build projects,” says Melissa Samet of American Rivers. “If you highlight the fact that there are big environmental impacts, that usually hurts that effort. The cost of mitigation is a project cost, so it adds to the cost of the project. And then there’s this whole other layer of getting it implemented, getting it monitored, getting it done, that the Corps has historically had problems with.” Conflict of interest-o-rama!

3. Zebra Musseling InInvasive species — a known and serious problem in the Great Lakes — have also worked their way into the Mississippi Basin, where they are posing dangerous threats to native species and ecologies. Asian carp are pushing native buffalo carp out of the Illinois River. Retiring Higgins’ Eye mussels on the Upper Mississippi — already hurt by ecological changes brought on by the lock-and-dam system — are being ousted by resource-hogging non-native zebra mussels, which alter the quality of the water and the riverbed for the worse in the process.

The Mississippi River has been so thoroughly engineered over the past two centuries — and those changes so vociferously defended in the name of perpetuating the nation’s economic growth — that without deeper reflection, it would be tempting to call it a loss as far as “wild nature” is concerned. But the native ecological qualities and processes of the Mississippi and its wildlife — its “ecosystem services” — likely have at least as much value as the goods on the barges traversing the locks and dams. Who’s quantifying that value, and what’s the cost to us if it becomes impossible to recover? And hey — what responsibilities do we have to the well being of other species, even if they don’t rate directly on our profit and loss statements? The Mississippi’s going to be a proving ground for that debate in coming decades.

4. It’s Not Easy Being AmphibianThe likelihood that climate change will bring more moisture to the mid-Mississippi River region might sound like a boon for amphibians and fish. But the way that rain is likely to fall — in less frequent but heavier bursts — could mean disaster for aquatic species dependent upon more even water flows. “If you’re getting very intense episodes of precipitation, it means in other parts of the year you’re getting intense drying episodes,” says St. Louis University biologist Jason Knouft. “And the majority of aquatic diversity occurs in smaller streams, say across the entire Mississippi Basin,” that are more susceptible to drying out. “You’re altering these flow regimes,” Knouft says, “which then has cascading effects on the habitat quality for aquatic taxa, and it sort of cascades down.” Who speaks for the climate-challenged fishes?

5. Ruler of All the RiverIn a 2007 report on Mississippi River water quality, the National Academy of Sciences opined that, “Too little coordination among the 10 states along the river has left the Mississippi River an ‘orphan’ from a water quality monitoring and assessment perspective. Stronger leadership from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, along with better interstate coordination, is needed to address these problems.”

And why stop at water quality? There are plenty of cross-border crises to choose from: Higher flood levels, threats to local and national economies if New Orleans washes away, climate change impacts, native species protection, disintegrating stormwater systems, sewer overflows, etc. And then there’s the hypoxic “dead zone” radiating from the mouth of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico — created in large part by runoff from agricultural operations throughout the basin.

Kudos are due to the growing collaborations along the Mississippi corridor that are working to protect the river, such as those that Grist’s Sarah van Schagen noted in her account from Dubuque, Iowa, last fall; the organizers of and participants in February’s Levee Safety Summit in St. Louis; and the environmental groups behind the Corps Reform Network. They’re pointing the way to the future. More is needed.

6. Everything’s RhineThe Army Corps dredges, diverts, locks, dams, dikes, and channelizes the Mississippi and its tributaries largely in the name of facilitating navigation — remember, it was the federal government’s right to regulate commerce that led Congress to set the Corps loose on the river back in the 1820s.

But commerce can coexist with a Mississippi River that’s also being managed for higher ecological values, flood safety, and the onset of climate change. Southern Illinois University geologist Nicholas Pinter, who has studied rising flood levels on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, points to cross-border initiatives in Europe that are aiming to decrease damage from river flooding by maintaining low usage of the floodplains, and removing navigational structures that impede flowing water and raise flood levels. “It’s not even a question for them of increasing development in the floodplain,” says Pinter.

In low-lying Holland, this “Room for the River” policy has included lowering dozens of dikes along the Rhine and Meuse rivers; they’ll be overtopped in floods and thus relieve pressure on dikes further downriver. “It’s very clear in the literature over there that this was driven by late 20th century climate change,” says Pinter. “The Dutch government saw increasing amounts of water coming down the river. The consequences of doing nothing would have been horrific.”

Barge traffic on the Rhine is managed with significantly less intrusive engineering, he says, using single-hulled barges with a maximum draft of four to five feet — whereas the double-hulled barges on the Mississippi draft twice as much, and sometimes move in huge rafts of 40 or more. “Navigation could continue completely but perhaps differently” on the Mississippi, says Pinter, “with a new strategy for engineering the river.”

—-

There are many, many smart, creative minds set on solving the problems of the Mississippi and its communities — but also a legacy stretching back two centuries of powerful but shortsighted, self-interested river management to overcome. In the case of the Army Corps of Engineers, I wonder if this transformation will have to arise from changes within — as much as pressure from without — to really ensure a bright future for the Mississippi River.

I don’t have a prescription in my pocket for how that will happen — but I am looking forward to covering it.

]]>http://grist.org/article/gertz3/feed/0A post-Katrina homebuilding project gives hope for weathering severe stormshttp://grist.org/article/gertz8/
http://grist.org/article/gertz8/#respondFri, 21 Mar 2008 01:12:40 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gertz8/]]>When Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Mississippi on August 29, 2005, the storm’s 125-mile-an-hour winds and 25-foot wall of seawater ground homes, boats, and businesses into matchsticks across the state’s three coastal counties: Jackson, Hancock, and Harrison. The cities of Waveland and Bay St. Louis, roughly 20 miles east of the Mississippi-Louisiana state line, were practically flattened; whole neighborhoods were destroyed in larger cities like Biloxi and Gulfport. In the end, Katrina damaged over 94,000 homes across the three counties, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, with those in moderate- and low-income communities the hardest hit. Nearly three years later, the counties and their communities are still trying to recover.

A Biloxi home after Katrina hit.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

Although rebuilding has been slow, an innovative program in Biloxi is assisting low-income families in getting out of their FEMA trailers and back into affordable homes. In the process, it’s creating blueprints for how people living in the path of the Next Big Bad from the Gulf of Mexico can do so more environmentally soundly, safely, and affordably.

But should communities be re-established in a place that’s nearly certain to be walloped again?

Considering the Options

The Army Corps of Engineers took on that question after Katrina, when Congress directed the agency’s Mobile District to come up with recommendations for reducing damage from future storms on the Gulf Coast. “What we’d like to end up with is a more resilient coast, and more resilient communities along the coast,” says Susan Rees, the program manager for the Army Corps’ Mississippi Coastal Improvements Program.

The MsCIP has generated proposals for Mississippi that range from bolstering seawalls, to building a levee here and there, to restoring wetlands, coastal forests, and barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico that would act as natural barriers and floodwater storage. The Army Corps has also investigated the feasibility of buying out tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Mississippi’s three coastal counties, at an estimated cost of perhaps $4 billion, and letting the land return to a more natural environmental condition.

In September 2007, shortly after the public learned about the buyout proposal, the corps found itself hosting a town hall meeting in Hancock County, with hundreds of coast residents packing the Bay Waveland Middle School Cafeteria to express reactions ranging from interest to outrage. Some thought their homes and communities were being deemed expendable and resented it, says Sherry-Lea Bloodworth, executive director of the Hancock Housing Resource Center. “If you lived in Los Angeles and there was an earthquake, and they said don’t rebuild because there will be another earthquake, how would you feel?”

But at least one small Jackson County community — Pecan, in far southeastern Mississippi — has told the Army Corps that if Congress ultimately approves the buyout plan and appropriates the funds, it would like to leave its particular piece of wet pine savannah behind in favor of a much drier location, thank you very much. “This is an area that has flooded historically, and it was really severely damaged from Katrina,” says Rees, who stresses that such buyouts would always be voluntary.

Rees also says that the Army Corps is trying to account for future variables in its long-term MsCIP planning, ranging from how sea-level rise could affect the frequency and force of Gulf Coast hurricanes, to whether and how much storm protections decrease the population’s readiness to evacuate. “It’s a different twist than anything we’ve done in the past,” says Rees. “We just understand that we have to be very, very careful in how we tell people things. We can’t tell them that they are protected, because they’re not.”

Design on a Dime

“We discuss every day whether or not an area destined to be flooded should be rebuilt,” says Michael Grote, who directs the Biloxi Model Home Program. In partnership with the East Biloxi Coordination Relief and Redevelopment Agency and the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio of Mississippi State University, the program is spearheading the creation of seven demonstration homes in the neighborhood that feature storm-savvy designs at an affordable cost. “Our code of ethics demands that we ask if we’re putting someone in harm’s way, are we sufficiently mitigating the risk?”

Residents and architects meet at a Model Home fair.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

Many residents of East Biloxi had no intention of leaving despite the massive damage and likely risks, says Grote. In some cases their homes were their only asset, he says, leaving little choice about repairing or rebuilding. Or they simply didn’t want to abandon the neighborhood their families had lived in for generations — certainly not because of something as unremarkable as a hurricane. “Most of them have been through Camille, and thought that was going to be the worst” until Hurricane Katrina, Grote says, referring to the catastrophic 1969 hurricane that also flattened most of the Mississippi coast. “It’s a part of their life.”

Given that it’s “impossible to transplant a neighborhood elsewhere,” as Grote says, the question becomes, “How do we rebuild in a way that’s smart?”

One smart thing is to minimize the negative environmental impacts of construction and repair. There, too, restoring East Biloxi was a good choice. “More than any gizmo, gadget, or foam,” says Grote, “the most sustainable thing we can do is build back where the infrastructure is still there: electricity, water, sewer, streets, roads, schools.”

The model homes, in addition to hewing to a modest budget — the original target was around $120,000; costs on the ground have proven closer to $140,000 — have to meet complex structural prerequisites for rebuilding in the flood zone. “The program was designed to surpass even FEMA’s engineering requirements,” says Bloodworth, who was the program’s first director, “and use much more innovative construction and design.”

Each house’s design sets it several feet above the ground on pilings, a great solution to endemic flooding that, surprisingly, isn’t common to residential building in the region, according to Grote — who adds that the project initially had trouble finding contractors who would drive piles on a residential scale, especially to the program’s desired 10-foot depth that would better stabilize a house on water-saturated soil.

Designing a house that was affordable and that “rebuilt a family” were just parts of the challenge, says Chung Nguyen of MC2 Architects, one of several firms invited to participate in the Model Home Program. The mandate was also “how to bring the community back, and how the pattern of the city can be rebuilt,” he says, “not just rebuilding so that in 10 or 15 years we have the same problem.”

The MC2Architects design.

Photo: Architecture for Humanity

The bungalow solution his firm devised — which was chosen by two of the seven families participating in the pilot program — floats nine feet off the ground on pilings, and is engineered to withstand hurricane winds up to about 140 miles per hour. It has a modular design that makes it easy to adapt to different properties: for the Nguyens (no relation to their architect), a family of six, the new home will accommodate a beloved oak tree that survived Katrina; the new home of husband and wife Hiep Tran and Lang Tho Do will feature a large porch that faces the neighborhood streets, providing shade while allowing the older couple to sit comfortably and interact with their neighbors.

“What we provide them is a very minimal house in the beginning,” Nguyen says. “Hopefully as the situation there recovers, and with steady jobs, people can make money, and begin to add on to the house.”

MC2 Architects based its design on regional architectural traditions that can ultimately cut down on energy use. “We take the shotgun house that’s prevalent throughout the Gulf Coast region, because it’s proven to work with the climate,” says Nguyen. “The whole idea is that you can open the door and let the air move through the house during the summer months.” The slanted roof sheds rain, with deep overhangs shielding the windows; lockable shutters will allow the families to sleep safely with open windows, and also to protect the windows from flying debris in a future storm.

Nguyen says that both the Tran and Nguyen residences, still under construction, are averaging around $58 per square foot, compared to the $110 per square foot that he hears is closer to the norm in Biloxi. The low cost has enabled him to plan a more spacious residence for each family than they might otherwise have been able to afford — including four bedrooms for each of the Nguyen’s teenage children and a master bedroom for the parents. Cong Nguyen, a shrimp boat mechanic, says he’s very happy about the new home; his expression is limited by natural shyness as well as imperfect English. His 13-year-old daughter, Bach Yen, says she’s looking forward to having her own bedroom when they finally move into the house.

Earthly Possessions

Although green materials can drive up the cost of a residence, the East Biloxi model homes incorporate some low-impact materials while staying on budget, says Grote, including no-VOC paints, bamboo flooring where possible, and fiberboard siding instead of vinyl. He’s especially pleased that they’ve been able to use a spray foam insulation based on soybean oil instead of petroleum products, saying that it’s an extremely energy-efficient material more typical to higher-end green construction. “It’s more expensive up front, but saves money down the road” by reducing utility bills.

The landscaping around the model homes will include new oaks, magnolia, plum, and other native trees in spots where they’ll create good shade — albeit in about 20 years. These young trees don’t quite replace the many venerable oak trees, some over two centuries old, that Biloxi lost to Hurricane Katrina. But it’s a start.

The rebuilding begins.

Photo: Emily Pilloton

Detailed information for each Model Home Program design has been posted online at Architecture for Humanity’s free Open Architecture Network; the group hopes to see them more widely implemented throughout coastal Mississippi, and adapted anywhere else that’s prone to similar weather. The program has also gotten funding to help with the repair of hundreds of East Biloxi homes that were not damaged beyond recovery, and in some cases has suggested to homeowners that they sell their property — spots where, for instance, “we would have to elevate the home 18 feet off the ground” to be safe, says Grote — and move to a lower-risk area. But ultimately, it’s up to the people who call the place home.

West of Biloxi, Sherry-Lea Bloodworth is bringing the lessons of the Model Home Program to rebuilding affordable housing in Hancock County’s cities and towns. “Seventy percent of all housing stock in Hancock County was destroyed outright or not recoverable, affecting 44,000 residents,” she says, and most of the county’s affordable housing was severely damaged. In Waveland, 95 percent of all buildings were destroyed or severely damaged, she says. “In Bay St. Louis, not much better.”

And yet, as in Biloxi, there are lowland communities in these cities where some families have lived for generations, and seem to want to stay despite the risks. “It’s bigger than just ‘move them out of there,’ ” says Bloodworth. “These are lives. Where are they going to go?”

]]>http://grist.org/article/gertz8/feed/0house-construction_h240.jpgEPA set to kibosh Mississippi Delta boondogglehttp://grist.org/article/leggo-my-yazoo/
http://grist.org/article/leggo-my-yazoo/#respondThu, 07 Feb 2008 00:37:00 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=21692]]>Successive presidential administrations — including the current one — have tried to rein in the Army Corps of Engineers and its projects, which are mostly known for their tangy combination of high cost, arguable utility, and disregard for the environment. Tried — and largely failed, thanks to the level-10 force fields erected by congresscritters who covet the flood of Corps project dollars into their districts.

The pump project is situated in the Mississippi-Yazoo Delta, a 7,000-odd-mile lowland swath that extends in a long diamond from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss. Since the 1800s, Americans have worked hard to become wealthy from the Delta’s rich river-mud-turned-topsoil and its proximity to Mississippi River shipping traffic. Their efforts have been supported by the Army Corps, whose history and power is inextricably twined with over 150 years of complex, costly, and politically charged efforts to control flooding and aid commerce along the Mississippi.

The Yazoo hydraulic pump would be the world’s largest, powerful enough to drain up to 6 million gallons of water a minute from over 300 miles of wetlands in northwestern Mississippi. Ostensibly a flood-control boon for poor Delta farming communities, in reality “more than four-fifths of the economic benefits calculated by the Corps would go to flood-prone farmers who already collect gigantic subsidies to grow soybeans on marginal land,” as Mike Grunwald reported last week in Time. And thanks to legislative sleight of hand by Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott (both R-Miss.) in the mid-1990s, the federal government would pick up the entire $220 million tab, with no cost-sharing by the state of Mississippi.

The Corps has estimated that around 67,000 acres of wetlands would be affected or degraded; scientists put it closer to 200,000 acres — and over 500 of them signed a letter decrying the project (PDF). Tomato, to-mah-to — either way, apparently EPA has decided the ecological costs are way too high, and per its responsibilities under the Clean Water Act, it’s setting up to veto a Corps project for the first time since 1990. Says eco-advocate Melissa Samet, who works on Corps reform with the nonprofit American Rivers, “EPA is doing exactly what it ought to be doing in this case” based on the overwhelming facts. Samet says that the Fish and Wildlife Service has also submitted a hard-hitting critique of the pumps plan, estimating that it would significantly harm fish and wildlife in the affected areas.

The Yazoo Pumps project is “a relic of an era when wetlands were considered wastelands,” writes Grunwald. It’s an attitude that’s all the more aggravating given our better grasp now of the (arguably) abstract value of wild habitats, plants and animals for their own sake, and the calculable economic benefits of wetlands in protecting humans from catastrophic floods and storms.

Even if the Yazoo Pumps project dies its much deserved death, the Army Corps is still a major player in the future of the Mississippi River Delta. The president’s budget for Fiscal Year 2009 includes a request of $10.5 billion for the Corps — including $5.76 billion targeted to flood control and storm protection projects for New Orleans.

Feeling unusually infertile lately? You’re not alone: according to a December 2005 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, around 12 percent of American couples reported having a hard time conceiving a child and bearing it to term in 2002, up 20 percent from the 6.1 million couples reporting such “impaired fecundity” in 1995. Although the reasons are complex and overlapping, one major factor may be nonstop exposure to low-level environmental pollutants like pesticides, dioxins, and phthalates.

Because these toxics are generated in ways and places beyond our immediate control, “You can’t shop your way completely 100 percent out of these exposures,” says Anila Jacob, M.D., a senior scientist with the nonpartisan Environmental Working Group. But changing some habits and product choices may help with the baby-making.

Here are some of the big bads of low-level environmental pollution, and what you can do to cut your exposure. Still, it’s not going to be green consumerism that ultimately solves this problem, but green chemistry: replacing these harmful substances at the manufacturing level with safer alternatives. And making that happen will probably require a hard nudge from lawmakers and regulators.

1

Substance: Bisphenol A (BPA)

Have I been exposed to it? Probably. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found BPA in 95 percent of people it tested.

How the hell did that happen? It’s used in polycarbonate plastic products like water bottles, shatter-resistant baby bottles, sunglasses, and CDs; epoxy resins typical of food and beverage can linings; and dental sealants.

Risks: Animal testing has shown that fetal exposure to even small amounts of BPA — lower than the levels found in the typical human — can lead to prostate cancer and breast cancer. Studies on rodents have shown reduced sperm counts.

Especially for you gals! BPA is implicated in polycystic ovary syndrome, which affects 1 in 10 U.S. women and is the leading cause of women’s infertility. This syndrome can also cause the growth of skin tags and excess hair, irregular periods, and obesity.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? Difficult. Canned foods are a big source of exposure, with beverages the lowest, pastas and soups the highest. So opt for glass packaging for these foods, or cook from scratch. Cut back on prepackaged infant formulas for the ankle-biter. Until manufacturers get the BPA out of polycarbonate (#7 plastic), switch to glass, polypropylene (#5) or polyethylene (#1, #2, #4) containers; trade out that polycarbonate water bottle for a stainless steel model; and don’t heat liquids or foods in polycarbonate containers or plastic wraps.

2

Substance: Phthalates

Have I been exposed to them? Yes, unless you’ve been living under a rock, and possibly even then. Around 80 percent of Americans are sporting phthalates in their bods.

How the hell did that happen? Manufacturers love phthalates: they impart durability and flexibility to all sorts of products, like cosmetics, nail polishes, fragrances, and grooming aids. They’re used to soften polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, aka vinyl, which are the stuff of common consumer goods like children’s (and adults’) soft toys, garden hoses, shower curtains, chair cushions, car interiors, artificial Christmas trees, and so much more. Phthalates are also used in plastic medical devices such as blood-storage bags and intravenous tubing — and since phthalates are chemically attracted to fats, the blood draws them out of the plastic before it enters you.

Risks: Holy endocrine disruptor! In studies on rodents, phthalates caused testicular injury and developmental abnormalities. Reports published in 2002 and 2003 suggested that minute levels of phthalates were linked to sperm damage in men. A 2005 study led by biostatistician and epidemiologist Shanna Swan correlated exposure to phthalates in the womb with adverse affects on the genital development of boys.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? Swap out the soft PVC plastic products in your life for other materials: trade that vinyl shower curtain for fabric or nylon, say, or swap soft vinyl toys for high-quality silicone. (You’ll earn an extra-special green star, because PVC is environmentally evil from production to disposal.) The online Skin Deep Database is a good place to start looking for phthalate-free beauty and grooming products. Some hospitals are pledging to phase out PVC equipment, especially in newborn intensive-care units. Although the E.U., Japan, and other nations are banning phthalates in some products, like children’s soft toys and cosmetics, there’s no federal action in the works in the U.S.

3

Substance: Persistent organic pollutants (POPs)

Have I been exposed to them? Yep. Every living organism on earth now contains persistent organic pollutants, so why not you?

How the hell did that happen? Although there are various routes to exposure, most likely you ate them. POPs include organochlorine pesticides such as chlordane, dieldrin, DDT, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, and toxaphene. Because POPs resist biological, chemical, or photolytic degradation (they’re persistent, right?), they can last long after they were initially used, and easily travel via wind and water over long distances from where they were used. POPs bioaccumulate in human and animal tissue, and biomagnify in the food chain. So the higher up on the food chain you eat, the more likely and more concentrated your exposure to POPs. Mmmm, pass that bacon cheeseburger, willya?

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? You can’t — they’re persistent, remember. But you can take some comfort in the fact that 140 nations from Albania to Zambia have signed on to the Stockholm Convention to ban the 12 top POPs and cut the total POPs entering the environment. Alas, the U.S. isn’t one of them. Still, you are (to some extent) what you eat. So reduce POP exposure by munching more organic foods and eating lower on the food chain. Mmm, pass that miso soy-cheese veggie burger, willya?

4

Substance: Perchlorate

Have I been exposed to it? Probably. In a 2001-2002 study by the CDC, every one of 2,820 U.S. residents ages 6 and older — a nationally representative population sample — was found to have perchlorate in the urine, although at a level well below what the Environmental Protection Agency deems safe. It’s been detected in human breast milk as well. As of 2005, environmental releases of perchlorate had been found in 35 states.

How the hell did that happen? Perchlorate is a component of rocket fuels, fireworks, and some fertilizers; it travels through soils into groundwater, thence into drinking and irrigation supplies, and thence into milk, lettuce, and other foods. In a November 2004 report, U.S. Food and Drug Administration scientists reported finding an average 7.76 to 11.9 parts per billion of perchlorate in around 90 percent of lettuce samples from Arizona, California, Florida, New Jersey, and Texas, as well as an average of nearly 6 ppb in 97 percent of cow’s milk samples collected at stores in 14 states. “It’s so prevalent in food that we don’t feel comfortable telling people to avoid it” because they might give up too many nutritionally important foods, says Jacob of EWG.

Risks: Perchlorate can inhibit the uptake of iodide by the thyroid. And since pregnancy itself puts extra strain on the thyroid, perchlorate exposure may put pregnant women at greater risk of miscarriage, preeclampsia, and placental abruption, while their developing fetuses may suffer stunted birth weight and abnormal brain development.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? So far, the closest we’ve gotten to a national ban in the U.S. was a 2003 EPA directive banning agency staffers from publicly discussing perchlorate pollution. If you suspect it’s in your drinking water, get it tested — and if needed, install water filters that are proven to remove perchlorate (Brita and Pur won’t cut it here). Consult with your doctor to ascertain that you’re getting enough iodide, especially if you’re pregnant or considering pregnancy.

5

Substance: Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs)

Have I been exposed to them? Sitting on a foam-cushioned sofa or chair, reading this article on your computer screen? Then that’s affirmative.

How the hell did that happen? PBDEs are employed as flame retardants in clothing, electronics, furniture, and carpeting. Particles get released when you sit down on a treated cushion; heat up a toaster, television, or computer; or walk on a treated carpet. The particles attach to dust, fabric, and more, and enter the water table via the laundry. When they burn, they can create more highly toxic substances, such as dioxin. When electronic waste is disposed of improperly, PBDEs can leach into the environment. And, like POPs, they’re bioaccumulative. PBDE levels have increased exponentially in our tender flesh since they started being used widely in the 1970s — which means if you were born from the 1980s onward, they may well have been in your mother’s breast milk.

Risks: There isn’t much research into the possible health impacts of PBDEs. In a study published in 2005, a single, low, in utero dose of the most common PBDE disrupted the neurological and reproductive development of some very unfortunate rats, which were born both hyperactive and permanently low on sperm.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? Difficult — tactics include effectively controlling dust and improving ventilation where you live and work. And, as with avoiding POPs, eating fewer animal fats. The Washington State Department of Health offers a comprehensive list of avoidance tips; as for buying furniture, electronics, and other products that are PBDE-free, a good resource is the Smart Shoppers PBDE Card from the Sightline Institute. This year PBDE bans have been proposed in California, Connecticut, New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, and Montana; Washington passed a limited PBDE ban to take effect in 2008. Given ever-more-comprehensive e-waste and PBDE control in Europe, Japan, and elsewhere, the U.S. — where rules remain at the state level, and spotty — could become the global dumping ground for PBDE-full electronics. USA! USA!

6

Substance: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Fun fact: Although made up of only hydrogen and carbon, there are over 100 PAH compounds.

Have I been exposed to them? Chances are darn good that if you are reading this on a computer, you’re in an environment where you’ve been exposed to PAHs.

How the hell did that happen? Because they resist degradation in the environment, PAHs are sometimes grouped under POPs. PAHs are typically products of incomplete burning of carbon-containing fuels like wood, coal, oil, and gasoline — that’s soot to you and me — and are also found in coal tar, which is often used to make pavement sealer. Burning tobacco — those veils of secondhand smoke we all walk through these days — also creates PAHs. And they’re in charred meat.

Risks: Exposure to PAHs in utero has been shown to cause damage to DNA, chromosomal changes, and increased risk for childhood cancers such as leukemia. One study found that such exposure might trigger prenatal development of leukemia.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? Common sense suggests taking off your shoes at the door to avoid tracking PAHs into the house, doing your best to not inhale secondhand smoke, eschewing charred meat, and taking whatever actions you can to support clean energy generation. The EPA only regulates discharges of PAHs into waterways from industrial operations. Watch for action at the state and local level, such as the Austin, Texas, ban on coal-tar-based pavement sealants enacted in January 2006. (Asphalt contains a far lower concentration of PAHs, and some newer sealants are touted as virtually PAH-free.)

Have I been exposed to them? Do you clean the house? Wash your clothes? Paint your walls? Use contraceptives? Then ‘fraid so.

How the hell did that happen? Surfactants are commonly used in liquid detergents, as well as cleaning solutions, fragrances, air fresheners, and paints. And nonoxynol-9, a common spermicide often used in condoms, diaphragm creams, and other contraceptive products, contains an alkylphenol. Happy borking!

Risks: Alkylphenols act like little estrogen shots in the body, disrupting embryonic development of the reproductive system. And since they accumulate in tissue, they continue to mimic estrogen, basically forever. Male platyfish in alkylphenol-polluted rivers produce female egg yolk proteins, and lose the sperm-producing parts of their testes.

Scary! So how do I avoid this crap? Difficult. Alkylphenols are tightly controlled in the European Union and Canada, but less so in the U.S. The Sierra Club has asked the EPA to ban alkylphenol use in places where wastewater treatment plants are not equipped to remove them. Some manufacturers, including Procter & Gamble and Unilever, have substituted other chemicals for alkylphenols in detergents, and Wal-Mart is pressuring its suppliers to do the same.

]]>http://grist.org/article/chemicals2/feed/0Your intrepid Grist correspondent sweats through an arena concert, so you don’t have tohttp://grist.org/article/alive-after-live-earth/
http://grist.org/article/alive-after-live-earth/#respondMon, 09 Jul 2007 23:01:08 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=18134]]>Don’t ever say we never did anything for you. On Saturday, while you were cavorting in the surf, grilling organic free-range meat on the barbecue (or is that barbecuing meat on the grill?), or kicking back with a good book in the sweet, sweet air conditioning, Grist was sweating at Live Earth New York. Er, New Jersey. Whatever.

We suffered through sets by Ludacris, Melissa Etheridge, Roger Waters, and the Police to report back — to YOU, dear Grist reader — from the front lines of global eco-activism.

Or something like that.

Check back soon for my report from the scene of Live Earth at Giants Stadium on 7/7/07.

]]>http://grist.org/article/alive-after-live-earth/feed/0Newer and cheekier!http://grist.org/article/the-most-important-eco-books-an-alternative-list/
http://grist.org/article/the-most-important-eco-books-an-alternative-list/#respondFri, 22 Dec 2006 02:44:44 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=15351]]>With sincere respect to my colleagues across the Atlantic (this is all a matter of opinion, after all), I’m dismayed by some of the choices on their list of most important environmental books. Hoary tomes like The Lorax, an analysis of the impact of pesticides on the environment that’s nearly a half-century old (I shake in my boots to criticize La Carson thus) … if the list were of books that had a big impact in their time, or books that will bolster the sentiments of the already-sympathetic, then it would be enough.

But the “small is beautiful,” “earth as organism,” “pursue simplicity” approach to eco-reform reflected in most of these choices has not proven a big winner in Western mass culture. Right or wrong, converting Western mass culture is the task at hand today, if we’re going to solve the problems addressed by these authors over the decades.

What are the books that speak to more recent science, contemporary events, and our evolving understanding of the intersections of environment with economy, culture, and human rights?

]]>http://grist.org/article/the-most-important-eco-books-an-alternative-list/feed/0Using grease and other goodies, small biodiesel producers are making a big differencehttp://grist.org/article/gertz6/
http://grist.org/article/gertz6/#respondFri, 08 Dec 2006 02:30:12 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gertz6/]]>If you live in a city of any size, you’ve likely seen them out there: boxy little ’80s-era foreign cars, bumpers adorned with pro-ecology and anti-war slogans, and references to “grease.” Even the fumes they emit may smell different: literally like French fries, in some cases; like generic used vegetable oil in others.

Foh sizzle my fuel-izzle.

Photo: iStockphoto

Welcome to the small-scale biodiesel movement, a grassroots challenge to Big Oil and Big Ag. While corporate giants create fuel by refining crude oil and fermenting corn, these more modest initiatives focus on a feedstock no one else wants: waste cooking grease. And their premise is radical: For them, energy production not only moves cars and heats homes, it also builds wealth and creates jobs in local communities. And the side benefits aren’t bad either: reducing U.S. reliance on foreign oil, and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions in response to global warming.

Often started with crude homebrew equipment in the garage of an enthusiast, some biodiesel cooperatives are now scaling up, capitalized in part by eco-minded shareholders in their own communities. But can they create reliable sources of fuel — and survive in an energy world dominated by giants? In Georgia and Massachusetts, two projects are taking on this challenge in distinctly different ways.

Back to Bass-ics

In 2001, Rob Del Bueno was a bassist in a rock ‘n’ roll band, and owner/operator of Zero Return Studios, an independent recording venue in Atlanta’s downtown Cabbagetown neighborhood. A musician in from California to record happened to mention that his singer-songwriter girlfriend was traveling around the country in a van she’d converted to run on vegetable oil. This chance conversation started Del Bueno down a long and winding road toward renewable-energy activism, powered by biodiesel — fuel for motoring and heating that is sourced from plants, waste vegetable oils, and animal fats, rather than petroleum.

Rob Del Bueno.

Photo: Gwinnett Daily Post

Already environmentally aware and — to understate things thoroughly — no fan of the Bush administration and its Big Oil cronies, Del Bueno found it impossible to resist the prospect of a clean-burning, cheap, and renewable alternative to petroleum-based fuels. Once convinced this crazy story about a girl and her veggie-powered van was true, the Atlanta musician — better known to fans of surf-rock as Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard of the band Man Or Astro-Man? — became obsessed with the idea.

Del Bueno first scoured the internet, tracking down biodiesel arcana. Next, he started brewing biodiesel in his own kitchen. “I took some vegetable oil, some sodium hydroxide, a little bit of methanol, and started playing with it,” the 34-year-old told Grist. “I decided to buy myself an old beat-up diesel, a 1974 240D Mercedes, and started making the fuel in larger batches and trying to use it in the car. And it was working! It kind of blew my mind.”

Soon Del Bueno was driving around Atlanta in his homebrew-fueled, pro-grease sticker-covered Mercedes, an evangelist with a growing congregation. “Friends would be like, ‘Hey, if I got a diesel, could I get some fuel from you?'” He also connected veg-fuel enthusiasts via a local online forum. “We started having little monthly gatherings — we’d call them ‘bio-b-ques.’ We would get together and hang out, cook some barbeque, and geek out about biodiesel and other bio-based fuels and related issues” — like global warming, the geopolitics of petroleum, and community-based energy production.

By October 2003, when the local alternative weekly Creative Loafing did a cover story on his biofuel exploits, Del Bueno was collecting used fry grease from local restaurants, cleaning it, and selling it as auto fuel at the rate of about 55 gallons a week — some of it to customers whose cars he converted to burn veggie oil himself.

The article brought out a lot of people wanting to buy his fuel, sell him equipment, supply him with grease, or otherwise support biofuel in Georgia, but also some unwanted attention. Del Bueno was, as he puts it, “informed indirectly” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that he faced fines of up to $25,000 per day for running an illegal, unregistered biodiesel manufactory.

Del Bueno initially suspected a plot — “I had all kinds of conspiracy theories about Big Oil and like that” — but came to realize that the EPA had some valid concerns. “There really are some safety issues and some environmental issues” around biodiesel production, he says. Del Bueno spent the next two years trying to figure out what the right scale of operation would be to cover the costs of permitting, insurance, fuel quality testing, and more, in order to go legit, expand his operation, and bring on the Southeast’s biodiesel revolution.

O Pioneers

Meanwhile, 1,000 miles north, some grassroots energy groups in New England realized that in order to survive financially, serve more customers, and build a truly community-owned renewable-power infrastructure, they could do a lot more united than apart. So Pioneer Valley Biodiesel Cooperative, a western Massachusetts purchasing group, and Co-op Plus, an energy co-op serving the region, came together with other community groups in 2004 to form Co-op Power, Inc., which would have an operating area of New York and New England. In short order this new organization formed Northeast Biodiesel and began raising capital to build a biodiesel production facility in Greenfield, Mass.

The Pioneer Valley, a biofuels hotbed.

Photo: iStockphoto

Lynn Benander, a consultant who had been working with regional cooperatives since 1996, helped Co-op Power form. She was impressed with its potential to succeed as a community-based energy producer while also keeping investment capital (and therefore jobs) in the Northeast. “It was the most viable business model that I had seen in this area in that 10-year period,” Benander told Grist. In 2005 she left her consulting job to manage Co-op Power — even though it didn’t have any money to pay staff. The project, still operating largely on volunteer efforts, now has a bare-bones budget of about $35,000 a year.

r touts Co-op Power’s capitalization model: operating across a sufficiently large geographic area that it could eventually recruit enough member/investors, at $975 a share, to generate investment capital sufficient to launch several community-scale renewable-energy projects. “There’s tremendous opportunity for collaboration as we move forward in that way, looking at how to maximize the benefit back to our communities” in terms of jobs and money savings, Benander told Grist. Her vision is expansive: “Net-zero or energy-producing buildings [and] energy-producing communities, instead of energy-draining communities.”

Co-op Power currently works with regional fuel distributors to supply several dozen households in New York and New England with biofuel for home heating and some farm uses at a discount of five to 10 cents per gallon; members also get assistance and discounts on installations of solar energy systems.

Meanwhile, it’s going forward with plans for the Greenfield plant. To finance the facility, Co-op Power has raised member shares of about $125,000, and has scared up around $4 million in loans, $625,000 in federal grants, and $2.1 million from investors.

One investor, Tom Leue, is the president of Williamsburg, Mass.-based Homestead, Inc., which since 1998 has distributed more than 20,000 gallons of biodiesel a year in Vermont and Massachusetts under the moniker Yellow Brand Premium Biodiesel. “Biodiesel is more addictive than oil,” Leue likes to say, alluding to the way it provides power while also recycling waste oils and slashing greenhouse-gas output. Leue says waste-grease biodiesel ultimately releases just five percent of the total carbon dioxide as typical fossil fuels.

The Next Steps

As Co-op Power was getting off the ground in Massachusetts, Rob Del Bueno was struggling to keep Vegenergy, his little fuel-supply operation, afloat in Atlanta. In mid-2005, a customer and friend who had followed his travails revealed that she was on the board of a foundation. Go the nonprofit route, she advised, and her foundation would probably grant him some seed money.

Del Bueno approached the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a coalition of Southeastern groups focused on combating global warming, to be his nonprofit conduit to funding; SACE offered to adopt the entire project instead, with him as manager. So since January, Del Bueno’s been working on his dream project: developing a prefab plant that can safely transform waste cooking oil into about 200,000 gallons annually of high-quality biodiesel.

Both this facility and its retail counterpart, which Del Bueno describes as “a kind of automated biodiesel gas station,” are housed in standard-sized shipping containers — 40-foot and 20-foot, respectively. That’s small enough that Del Bueno imagines operators locating the fuel plants on the sites of local chemical facilities, thus piggybacking on existing industrial zoning, while the fueling station can be “dropped into any parking lot, connected to power and phone lines, and [make] biodiesel available via pay-at-pump 24/7” using an ATM-like swipe card.

This overcomes what Del Bueno calls biodiesel’s chicken-and-egg problem: gas stations don’t want to carry it because there is too little demand, and drivers hesitate to buy diesel cars because they can’t easily find the bio-sourced fuel.

With corporate behemoths shifting into biofuels with a vengeance, the fate of projects like Vegenergy and Northeast Biodiesel seems to some as precarious as that of a beat-up old diesel compact car chugging along amid thundering 18-wheelers on the interstate. But just like that time-tested vehicle, these operations may be deft and durable enough to survive.

]]>http://grist.org/article/gertz6/feed/0fries_240.jpgSee post-bovine methane generate clean electricity!http://grist.org/article/from-cow-poop-to-cow-power-a-journey-in-photographs/
http://grist.org/article/from-cow-poop-to-cow-power-a-journey-in-photographs/#commentsSun, 29 Oct 2006 23:49:24 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=14631]]>On some days it’s especially fabulous to be an eco-scribe. I had one of those days on Wednesday, Oct. 25. As part of a group from the Society of Environmental Journalists, I got to tour Vermont’s very first cow-power operation, in which the non-dairy output of a herd of Holsteins is turned into cleanly generated electricity. It’s got the potential to help more of Vermont’s beleaguered dairy farmers stay in business, while cutting their operation costs over time and keeping the methane generated by decomposing cow poop out of our greenhousing atmosphere.

The tour took place at Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, Vermont, owned by the same family for about three generations. We begin in the barn, a vast structure lit with natural light …

… and home to the farm’s many, many Holsteins:

This scraper moves along the rubber-mat-covered floor of the barn, gathering up stinky cow manure. Note how clean the floor is after the scraper’s pass:

The manure drops into this drain, and flows into a long drainage system that stretches several hundred yards:

Then it’s down into this holding tank, where it sits for about 21 days, being digested by the same bacteria that one would find in a cow’s stomach:

After digestion, the manure has been rendered a virtually odorless mix of methane gas, solids, and liquid. They’re separated by this machine …

… the liquids going to a holding pond and eventually to fertilize the farm’s fields of hay and other cow forage, and the solids into these giant mounds of material with a consistency of barely damp sawdust. No, this did not stink!

In the spirit of investigative journalism, I decided to get up close and personal:

Not stinky or gross. In fact, the farm now uses this material instead of kiln-dried sawdust (which it used to import from Canada at significant cost) to bed the cows. This sort of bottom-line savings is helping to pay off the $1.2 million cow-power system in well less than a decade.

The methane is drawn out of the system to power this generator …

… and up wires to these transformers …

…and from there out into the grid:

Voi la: clean energy from cow poop. I was so excited after this tour; it was informative, experiential, full of promise for a reasonably environmentally sound future ripe with family farms and open agricultural landscapes — and of course, well-populated with photogenic cows.

Mea culpa in advance for any mistakes in the nuances of the operation above; I’m getting this up sans notes. Please do expand upon this, and/or correct me, in the comments.

]]>http://grist.org/article/from-cow-poop-to-cow-power-a-journey-in-photographs/feed/1Not as dirty as it soundshttp://grist.org/article/green-sex-toy-sound-bites/
http://grist.org/article/green-sex-toy-sound-bites/#respondTue, 17 Oct 2006 05:32:20 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=14489]]>I’ve had the pleasure of covering all sorts of environmental matters, and interviewing fellow enviro-writers, in the past few years, often for Grist. But so far no piece has reverberated quite like Naughty by Nature: Ever thought about the toxins in your sex toys? Not that I’m complaining; my reputation as the author of this article consistently precedes me into various NYC green gatherings, leading to all manner of astonishingly frank conversation with casual acquaintances or total strangers. And when asked at dinner parties to explain what I do as an environmental journalist, it sure beats the melting Arctic or the destruction of the Everglades for upbeat chat.

Happily for the sexual health of every American, interest in this topic just won’t quit. To wit: I have a couple soundbites in this inaugural installment of TreeHugger Radio, a partnership between our pals at TH and EcoTalk Radio. As a huge fan of radio — and environmental journalism in all media formats — I wish them the best of luck.

]]>http://grist.org/article/green-sex-toy-sound-bites/feed/0How birding and blogging changed one soldier’s time in Iraqhttp://grist.org/article/gertz12/
http://grist.org/article/gertz12/#respondWed, 03 May 2006 23:13:44 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gertz12/]]>

Glassing the evening sky for feather and foe.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Trouern-Trend.

Jonathan Trouern-Trend has been a dedicated bird-watcher since he was about 12. So in 2004, when the now 38-year-old Connecticut National Guard sergeant got sent to Iraq, he had birds on the brain. While stationed at Camp Anaconda — a huge American installation located about 40 miles north of Baghdad in the Sunni Triangle near the Tigris River — Trouern-Trend got to know the better birding spots on the base, including a small lagoon and the camp dump. Since he was working in intelligence, the base MPs didn’t pay much attention as he peered through his binoculars. He recorded his observations anonymously on the blog Birding Babylon, and the matter-of-fact reports eventually attracted a wide readership.

Jonathan Trouern-Trend.

Readers took solace in Trouern-Trend’s observations of nature in the midst of a situation that seemed to be spinning out of control. “When I go to vote on Tuesday,” wrote one blog commenter in September 2004, “I will look at the birds and take courage in the fact that — as serious and as real as they are — war and politics are only a small part of life.” That same month, another wrote that she pictured Iraq “as barren and rubble! Who would have thought birds and butterflies would find havens there! We appreciate your reports and look forward to more … and your safe return.”

Trouern-Trend spent a little more than a year on active duty in Iraq and Kuwait, and saw 122 different bird species. His observations have now been collected in a slim, illustrated book also titled Birding Babylon, published by the Sierra Club. While it might seem impossible for a book about the Iraq war to leave politics aside, this volume is purely an appreciation of nature — wherever it may be found.

Today Trouern-Trend is back home in Connecticut, where he works in epidemiology for the American Red Cross and has recently created an interactive site devoted to the natural biodiversity of Iraq. Grist spoke with him by phone a day after he had taken his five children to the zoo in Providence, R.I.

The book came about because someone from the Sierra Club called and asked if I’d be interested. I agreed that it was a good idea. I’d started writing my magnum opus on the natural history of Iraq — which would probably take 20 years — but these are not mutually exclusive. This book will probably get a few more people interested.

Are you pleased with how the book came out?

It’s a little sparse on details. I was the intelligence sergeant for the battalions. Sometimes I didn’t want to describe areas in extreme detail, or talk about individuals who worked with us in enough detail that someone might have been able to identify them.

I’ve had mostly positive comments about the book, although one librarian said it was trite. I realized after reading some of his other work that he thought it would have been a great vehicle to make a political statement.

Which it very much does not.

Yes. I think he felt I had squandered this great opportunity. Hopefully it will be seen in a more positive light by others. You want to listen to your critics, but you don’t have to buy it all.

What motivated you to blog about birds from Iraq?

I was trying to get a handle — before I went — on what was going on there, beyond CNN. I started reading some soldiers’ blogs, and decided it was a good medium to work with. One purpose was an outlet to write down my observations. I also knew that no one had done any fieldwork in Iraq — at least any published in English — for 20 years. So from the standpoint of bird records, I thought it would be of value.

But I also intuitively knew that other people would be interested — because this is not how most Americans think about Iraq.

I found blogging useful in many ways. My superiors knew what I was doing and had no problem with it. It’s often the other layers of bureaucracy that feel like they need to put their two cents in. I kept the letter and the spirit of the law, I think.

By blogging anonymously and keeping details suppressed?

Yes. People were guessing I was in the south, the north. Even people on my base were leaving messages saying, “Hey, if you’re ever up in Anaconda …” I really didn’t care about getting the personal attention. Sometimes I think a lot of people blog to make themselves look good. Mine had a different purpose.

Thinking about it since, this was also a way of making connections with people who might not otherwise have connections with anyone in the military. It’s a different demographic.

And you did get a huge response from that demographic, didn’t you?

Yes. A couple people started looking at it. And then people mentioned it on listservs. Then I got an email from a producer from NPR’s WeekendEdition, and I did an interview. After that tons of people started visiting. Some were pretty touched that there was something good going on in Iraq: “OK, the birds are migrating through.” How many people can identify with bombs going off, or getting rocketed? So seeing my observations juxtaposed with what they saw on the news made them feel that it was not total chaos in Iraq, a total loss of every semblance of human society, dignity, normality.

Truth be told, it was “normal” in some sense most of the time. We were one of the most frequently rocketed and mortared places in Iraq, because we were the logistics hub for the entire country. But it was not like total chaos all the time. They would never send a rocket or mortar our way before let’s say 5 or 6:30 in the morning, or after midnight. So you could have a kind of day-to-day existence. People got killed on our base, and quite a few got injured, but … you couldn’t run around all day worrying you were going to get hit by something. My attitude is always, “If it’s your time, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

So how was your wildlife-spotting received by your colleagues?

I’m always seen as somewhat of an oddity. “Ah, that’s Sgt. Trouern-Trend. He’s bird-watching, or out there catching a lizard.” I enjoyed my time there as much as I could. I got to go to some fascinating places. I was in Babylon, and went down to the ruins of Ur, where Abraham was supposed to have come from. Those things, maybe I could appreciate them more than your average soldier who’s younger than me, and might have different priorities.

I’ve talked to some military folks who say, “Well, obviously he had too much free time.” But really, it was just little snapshots here and there. I’d say, “Yes, and how long did you spend playing Xbox every day? Or watching satellite TV?” It’s just how people used their time.

Did you connect with Iraqis who shared your interests?

To the extent I could. There were a lot of Iraqis who worked on our base; some were farmers. I chatted with them about the animals they saw. Sometimes they would bring me bugs. And then the supervisors, we’d have more in-depth conversations about the date palms, and their importance, and what sort of critters were a problem with them — I guess they had some sort of a weevil. I think they felt I was interested in both their observations and in their culture. I tried not to be the Ugly American.

Did you perceive any contradiction between being on a military mission and being a naturalist?

I never did, too much. I’ve observed [in the U.S.] that military reservations tend to be the best-preserved spots in some areas. On Cape Cod, the Camp Edwards military reservation is probably the biggest stretch of pinelands there. So I don’t think they’re necessarily mutually exclusive.

More Words of War

Want to read more about the links between war and the environment? Check out these other new titles.

But I understand what you mean. You could make a case about the depleted uranium, the anti-armor rounds that have depleted uranium heads in them. One of our contractors had a master’s degree, and did his thesis on contamination around these tanks. When it comes to environmental pollution, those are probably a minor issue. People get really bent out of shape because [they’re threatened by] radioactivity. Even though eating mercury will kill you faster, and is more likely to, than walking by some old tank. But children playing on it, goats grazing at it — probably not a good idea either.

I can say for sure that Saddam was no environmentalist. I was reading something from the Yale School of Forestry: Iraq is [near] the bottom of their list of countries in environmental quality. One of the reasons is that the Tigris and the Euphrates were seen as convenient dumping grounds for chemicals, and industrialization was the highest priority. Cleaning up a lot of the chemicals is the top priority of the Ministry of Environment right now.

I’ve read that Saddam drained the marshes of southern Iraq as a vindictive measure against the Marsh Arabs.

It started as irrigation, but became a security issue for him. The marshes have been a security issue since the beginnings of history. There are writings about the enemies of Babylon hiding out in the marshes. The [modern] draining of the marshes didn’t start with Saddam — it was actually proposed by British engineers in the ’50s. I don’t think they wanted to completely drain them, but in pretty quick time this giant marshland became desert. Under Saddam, there was a massive push, after the uprisings after the Gulf War in the early ’90s. They went down to maybe 7 percent of their pre-drainage levels. And biodiversity took a hit.

In 2003, the Marsh Arabs started busting down the dikes and trying to re-flood areas, but kind of haphazardly. There’s an organization called Eden Again that has been trying to engineer the re-flooding in a better way. Now the rebound has been pretty significant.

I felt such a surge of hope when I read about the re-flooding of the Iraqi marshes, and the return of birds and flora — it’s striking how much we need those stories.

It’s one of the natural, common points among all people. I try to think about what could be in Iraq in the future. At this point there are a few Iraqi environmental groups. If people can think about the environment, it’s an important step in civil society. They’ve gone beyond “What are my immediate needs?” to “What’s going to happen in the future?”

Yes. There are people out there who are concerned about the environment in Iraq, and what’s going on there. But there needs to be a certain kind of critical mass. Having a place to aggregate all the data about the animals and the environment will hopefully draw some people who can create action. The wiki is about trying to engage people, and making it collaborative.

You mean Americans and Iraqis collaborating?

Definitely. The Iraqi scientific community has been isolated. Iraq needs to be pulled into the world community, so they can feel like they have a part. Hopefully, people will have ideas and put them up on the wiki.

One project I proposed last year was a bioblitz — I’ve participated in a couple here in Connecticut. Basically a bunch of scientists and interested amateurs, and often schoolkids, get together. Often they have a geographic focus. In a 24-hour period, they try to identify or take an inventory of every living thing they can. So it’s just trying to take a snapshot, a biological inventory. Often people will find new state records of something — like some dragonfly no one had ever thought was here.

On the last one I went on, as they were finding things, they’d photograph them and post them up to the web. Technology — that’s easy to do from anywhere in the world right now. An Iraq bioblitz would be just another way to show people that there are other things happening there that they can get on board with … How many people know that there are striped hyenas running around Iraq? People don’t realize that there is some wildness there.

Have you made any strides toward organizing any bioblitzes there?

I haven’t, but I think it’s going to start on the wiki site. There are some natural participants, like BirdLife International. I’ve actually corresponded with a guy from a new Iraqi NGO that they call Nature Iraq. I’m willing to go next week, personally, and I’m sure there are several dozen other people who would be willing, too. But you need the infrastructure, and a plan.

I’m also trying to create some sort of product that schools can use. The Palestinian Authority has a kids’ program that’s environmentally focused. And they’ve got a few other things, like instructions on making nest boxes for barn owls, which they give out to the farmers. That’s all in Arabic, so I might contact them and ask if we can print this up, and make it more Iraq-focused than Palestinian-focused.

Iraq has really taken hold of your imagination. Your deployment is over, but you’re still organizing new efforts. And I saw that you’ve been fielding emails on your blog from soldiers who are in Iraq and Afghanistan now.

I have something to contribute — maybe it’s a slightly different way of looking at things. But it’s pretty easy if you take the history into consideration: basically Western civilization started in Mesopotamia. I think the environmental aspect is definitely a place where we can make connections. It’s a natural unifier.

I would like to write something more in-depth and comprehensive. I think there’s a good story to be told, about humans and animals through the history of Iraq — how the dog was domesticated there, sheep, goats. The Babylonians had zoos; they saw something of value in all this exotic wildlife. There’s a good story to tell that people can identify with. We’ll see if I’m the one to tell it.

]]>http://grist.org/article/gertz12/feed/0jtt-binocs_528.jpgTwo new nature books for city slickershttp://grist.org/article/gertz10/
http://grist.org/article/gertz10/#respondFri, 07 Apr 2006 04:32:39 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gertz10/]]>Lately, green is the new black in the American metropolis. Here in New York City, the cabbies are driving hybrids and the fashionistas are wearing organic jeans. Even in my decidedly un-hip Brooklyn neighborhood, the corner deli sells organic milk and cookies.

Green is busting out all over.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Green-tinted consumerism is probably gaining ground in your city too. (Is that a Whole Foods opening up downtown? A Chipotle restaurant selling free-range pork burritos in the storefront that once nurtured a Krispy Kreme?) But if your city is anything like mine, centuries of energy, habitation, waste, and other systems are layered one on top of the other until they seem impervious to environmentally friendly living. And nature — that thing we’re trying to preserve when we buy post-consumer-content toilet paper — can seem set apart from daily life, even in a city blessed with the best of parks.

Urbanites game to reconnect with life cycles beyond the local latte joint may find Cosmo Doogood’s Urban Almanac 2006 a useful guide. Dedicated to “celebrating nature and her rhythms in the city,” it’s a riff on the traditional Old Farmer’s Almanac, aimed squarely at city slickers.

Doogood — an ebullient guise assumed by Eric Utne, founder of Utne magazine — provides the details on natural phenomena that tend to go right by harried urbanites: weather predictions, sun and moon rise, and various celestial events. Quotes, proverbs, historical dates, nature notes, and other nuggets of inspiration are sprinkled throughout, all generally short enough to be taken in while conserving that most precious urban resource: time. There’s even the odd hands-on project — decorating your own candles, or making yogurt cheese — to break the consumer trance of buying everything ready-made. (These may appeal to the Make magazine generation and their boomer parents, but will no doubt send a shiver down the spines of my own generational cohorts, who gladly left behind the candle-making with our 1970s childhoods.)

This eclectic content is arranged in a broadly drawn, politically progressive context, which includes brief biographies of against-the-grain activists deemed “Urban Treasures” and a longish essay on the political philosophies of that bastion of American iconoclasm, Benjamin Franklin.

The book is adorable verging on insufferable in its pseudo-rusticity. But when you find yourself ready to look between tall buildings to figure out the current phase of the moon, it will tell you what you need to know. It also steadfastly reworks the classic American equation of wilderness as saintly and urban as impure by offering up unlikely appreciations of the wild within the city — celebrating adaptable urban wildlife like raccoons, or looking for signs of the first frost on the surfaces of cars.

By contrast, Ben Jervey’s The Big Green Apple: Your Guide to Eco-Friendly Living in New York City is a more utilitarian handbook. Jervey drills down within broadly defined sectors — household habits, energy consumption, transportation, food, work, and play — to offer advice on consumer choices that intersect with large-scale environmental problems, like dirty energy generation or factory farming.

Happily, Jervey goes beyond mere shopping tips, packing Apple with divergent info — from a breakdown of the city’s recycling rules to a recipe for nontoxic toilet-bowl cleaner — that helps make it a go-to green-living guide for New Yorkers. And several profiles of inspirational local projects are likely to surprise people who think there’s nothing ecological going on in Gotham — like the trailblazing Brooklyn Brewery, the first commercial building in New York City to source its entire electrical load from clean energy. (There’s something echt New York about a company that finds a way to parlay borough-boosting ales into up-to-the-minute ecological virtue.)

Nature figures most directly in Big Green Apple‘s picture as a recreational and restorative resource — one that city dwellers may appreciate more with the naturalist eye they’ll cultivate by checking in daily with Cosmo Doogood’s almanac. But the guide’s bigger context is restoration of the natural systems that support city life — the ultimate reason to eschew cars in favor of bicycles or other modes, and use compact fluorescent bulbs instead of energy-hogging incandescents.

The proliferation of hip, appealing eco-friendly goods on the shelves of city stores is a welcome development. So is the boom in ways to live lighter on the concrete. A guide to tapping into these trends can help newly inspired urbanites and eco-devotees alike refine their shade of green. But it’s handy to have even a reconstructed hayseed like Cosmo Doogood jar our gaze upward, from the plate-glass windows to the bigger picture. When enough of us city slickers have curbed our emissions, perhaps we’ll once again be able to see the real stars from Broadway … and from the middle of your city, too.

]]>http://grist.org/article/gertz10/feed/0big-apple-skyline.jpgReporter Michael Grunwald gabs about his new book on the Evergladeshttp://grist.org/article/gertz4/
http://grist.org/article/gertz4/#commentsMon, 27 Mar 2006 23:59:21 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/gertz4/]]>For about 5,000 years, the waters of the peninsula we now call Florida flowed south into the Kissimmee River. The Kissimmee emptied into enormous Lake Okeechobee, which in turn spilled over into a vast, shallow sheet that slid slowly along the nearly flat expanse of south Florida to the ocean. This was the complex and subtle ecosystem of the natural Everglades, a seemingly endless marsh replete with sawgrass, birds, bugs, and muck dubbed “Grassy Water” by the Seminole Indians. “No country that I have ever heard of bears any resemblance to it,” wrote one 19th-century U.S. soldier in a local newspaper after he was sent to drive the Seminole out of the state. “It seems like a vast sea, filled with grass and green trees.”

In The Swamp, Michael Grunwald, a reporter for The Washington Post, recounts the successive generations of eager land sharks, politicians, sugar magnates, engineers, and farmers whose visions of “reclaiming” south Florida for industrious and profitable human use have transformed it into an ecosystem on life support. It is one long tale of environmental devastation, spasms of regret, and promises of repair — most recently, the multibillion-dollar Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan passed by Congress in 2000, a complex and controversial effort led by the state and the Army Corps of Engineers that has landed in intensive care alongside the landscape it’s supposed to bring back.

Grunwald’s in-depth reporting on the Everglades began in a Post series, which earned him a 2003 Society of Environmental Journalists Award. Approaching south Florida’s waves of rogues and reformers with marvelous pacing and style, he avoids judging figures from the past on modern terms in favor of interweaving the ecological, social, and political histories of the Everglades into a cracking good yarn.

Grist spoke with Grunwald recently as he drove along a Florida highway toward Orlando. The occasional dropped cell-phone connection didn’t impede a lively conversation about restoration, resistance, and the perils of being misunderstood.

Michael Grunwald.

Photo: The Washington Post.

What led you to write about the Everglades?

In 2000, I spent the entire year kicking the Army Corps of Engineers around in a series for the Post, mostly for the way they were cooking their economic studies to justify boondoggle projects that were also environmentally destructive. Then I heard that the Corps, which had helped destroy the Everglades, was now in charge of a project to help restore it. That struck me as really interesting, particularly when I heard that the project was going to be the largest environmental effort in history.

In my series, the Everglades was supposed to be the last part — the happy good-news story. When I finally went down there, I realized that it was a lot more complicated. It’s not exactly your grandfather’s Corps of Engineers, but it’s not a corps of biologists either. And there were some serious questions about whether this Everglades restoration project was actually going to restore the Everglades.

So has it? You write that the Kissimmee River restoration has succeeded.

The Army Corps in the ’60s turned the Kissimmee River into a ditch. It was no longer even called the Kissimmee River — people called it the C-38 Canal. Unlike some Corps projects, just about everyone really hated this one. There was incredible pressure to undo it. So the Corps was finally dragged kicking and screaming into a restoration project [in 1992] with the state pushing them to do it in a more environmentally sound way.

If the skeeters don’t getcha then the gators will.

Photo: iStockphoto.

When I visited the Kissimmee [in 2002] it was my first time in the ecosystem. A [state biologist] named Lou Toth, who was really the guiding force behind the project, took me into this broad-leaf marsh, a bunch of scraggly vegetation and water up to your shins. He cut off the airboat and made his grand gesture, saying, “A year ago this was all a bone-dry cattle pasture.” I looked around and said wow, if it’s this good now, what will it look like in 10 years? Lou looked at me like I was a moron and said, “Like this. We’re done. If you blow up a dam, if you get out of nature’s way, nature comes back.” And it’s true. The fish, the birds, the dissolved oxygen levels, the sandbars are back. But the Everglades restoration is a lot more complicated, because there are 7 million people living around the Everglades, which is not true of the Kissimmee.

When I started writing about the Everglades in 2002, the Post ran a story with Lou basically trashing the restoration project, saying that if the Corps hadn’t learned the lessons of the Kissimmee, they wouldn’t get it right. He got into a lot of trouble. Lou had been the employee of the year at his water management district the year they started restoring the Kissimmee. A couple years later he was demoted.

That seems to be a trend — retaliation against government employees who advocate for the Everglades, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who was fired after he objected to development projects in Florida panther habitat.

I try to be optimistic about a lot of things, but I find this depressing. These scientists are reaching conclusions that may not be exactly what economic interests want to hear. It’s understandable that there’s a lot of political pressure, but sometimes their bosses, and the politicians their bosses answer to, are really — I guess the polite term would be overly responsive.

Some politicians green up their message just to get through election season.

People have been able to get away with just being in favor of the Everglades. And they haven’t necessarily paid a price for that. But whether it’s the sugar industry, or real-estate industry, or water utilities, or rock mining, the real problem in the Everglades is not so much Big Sugar as it is big people.

Loving it to death just by showing up?

And showing up in the wrong places. In this $10 billion restoration plan, there is no provision for smart growth. So you’re asking the Army Corps, which isn’t exactly Picasso, to paint the masterpiece — yet every day you’re shrinking the canvas.

I’m about to marry into a developer family. My mother-in-law doesn’t build houses because she’s a bad person; she builds houses because there are millions of people in central and southern Florida because it’s 70 degrees and beautiful, and there are millions more coming. The question is whether you can put them in the right places so you’re not destroying the resources.

And yet Everglades restoration is a rare example in recent American environmental history where there’s any recognition that you’ve got to provision for the ecosystem.

That’s certainly the notion — that this is going to show we can coexist with the bugs and bunnies. It’s the possible model for the Chesapeake Bay, the Great Lakes, and Louisiana’s coastal wetlands — even the Garden of Eden marshes in Iraq.

Water is going to be the oil of the 21st century. If we can’t figure out a way to share it, you’re going to see wars fought over water. Everglades restoration is an ideal way to demonstrate that we can manage our water so that there’s enough for sustainable agriculture, and for the people who are going to continue to come, but also for a healthy ecosystem.

Recently in southeast Florida a bunch of developers, including a former business partner and others close to Jeb Bush, have been pushing for extending an urban development boundary. Jeb actually stepped in and said no, you’re going to destroy Dade County’s water supply. It shocked the enviros because he’s made no secret that he’s not a big fan of theirs. But it was an incredibly progressive decision.

Your book suggests that south Florida’s particular combination of politics and ecology sometimes transforms politicians.

Probably the best example is [Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.)], who was once rated the most conservative senator in America. He was anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, anti-United Nations, anti-taxes. He voted against Head Start. He’s a really conservative guy, but he fell in love with the Everglades. He always talks about how his son saw his first alligator there. He really got that this is going to be a model for whether we can live in harmony with nature.

Smith is the guy who, early in the book, is watching the oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Bush v. Gore with a very serious rooting interest. And suddenly he walks out in the middle of the most important Supreme Court case in decades, the case that would decide the leader of the free world — and goes over to the White House to celebrate the passage of the Everglades restoration bill.

You ask Al Gore whether he thought he lost Florida over an environmental issue, supporting the proposed Homestead airport on the edge of the Everglades.

Well, when you lose by 500 votes, I guess you could say you sort of lost over everything, right? But that cost him thousands of votes. I talked to a lot of environmentalists who made no bones about it — they were banging on Gore trying to get him to take a stand, and when he didn’t they started working for Ralph Nader. They encouraged him to come down and beat up Gore over this very issue. And he did. So there’s no question it had an impact. You could argue that in the long run, they might have been happier with an airport, and with a different president who had written a book about the environment.

It’s a little bit tragic, the story of the split between the enviros and the Clinton administration over the Everglades. To vastly oversimplify, the first issue that popped up was the Everglades Forever Act, which basically was about phosphorus pollution coming off the sugar fields. The Clinton administration cut a deal that involved Big Sugar paying a few hundred million dollars and effecting the largest nutrient pollution cleanup in the history of the world, and thought it had done a wonderful thing. But enviros said it was a horrible sellout. From that moment forward, Bruce Babbitt and some of his aides essentially decided the enviros didn’t know what they were talking about and there was no point in listening to them.

The nutrient pollution cleanup has been a terrific project that has done a lot of good. It certainly wasn’t a pure sellout. Yet the enviros were also right that it’s not enough, that the Everglades is just being poisoned a lot slower.

What are the challenges of reporting on the environment in the current political atmosphere?

For some people, any book about the environment means you’re immediately a leftist. And for other people, any book that doesn’t declare the sugar industry to be the root of all evil means you’re in the tank. That’s been kind of depressing as a journalist — to find that for so much of the country now every story seems to be viewed through a partisan lens instead of actually responding to facts.

As you depict it, the environmentalist scene in south Florida really seems to encapsulate the current tensions in the movement as a whole.

I do think you can see the story of American environmentalism through the Everglades. In the beginning they rose up to stop the hunters — an extractive industry — realizing that it couldn’t be right to wipe out every plume bird in Florida so that women could wear feathers on their hats. Stopping that slaughter was one of the country’s first great conservation victories. But ultimately these same people who saved the birds were the biggest advocates of draining the Everglades. The Everglades was a wasteland and conserving that land meant using it.

By mid-century there was a realization that stopping hunters and fishers was not enough to save a place — you’ve got to protect the land as well. Everglades National Park was actually the first one that was preserved not just for spectacular scenery, but also for its unique biology.

Prior to that the locations of the national parks tended to coincide with places that you couldn’t run a railroad over anyway.

Exactly. And they were “ooh and aah” parks. The Everglades is a more of a “hmm” place. So understandably, people saw it as a big, inhospitable, forbidding, mushy, muddy swamp, and draining the swamp was a metaphor for solving a problem.

As the ecology movement sprang up, people realized that the health of national parks is affected by activities outside their borders, and simultaneously they realized that people really care about the air we breathe, the water we drink, the landscapes we like, the fish that we eat.

Where do you think environmental advocacy goes from here?

I certainly don’t want to pretend to be any kind of spokesperson for the environmental movement — I’m just a reporter — but one thing that I’ve found shocking in this whole “Death of Environmentalism” debate is the notion that what environmentalists really need to do is help rebuild this grand coalition of the left to take back the country. That seems like crazy talk to me.

The best thing that environmentalists have on their side is the environment. People actually like it. One of the lessons of the Everglades is that when you don’t write off one of the parties you can create a bidding war with both sides wanting to do the right thing. The idea that you should just say the Republicans hate the environment so screw ’em seems horribly counterproductive, particularly when people are starting to realize that their aquifers depend on conservation, that their ecotourism and fishing economies depend on it.

Florida does loom large in the American environmental mind. A group here in New York has noted that the Army Corps 2007 budget has proposed $164 million for Everglades restoration, as compared to $600,000 for restoration of the waterways of our metropolitan area.

Everybody wants to be the next Everglades. When they were passing the restoration act, everybody went around saying, “It’s America’s Everglades.” So now in Louisiana, they’re calling it “America’s wetland.” There’s clearly the idea that maybe lightning can strike again.

While I certainly understand this kind of complaint — how come they’re getting $160 million and we’re getting bupkis — I do think that everybody should care about the fate of that restoration plan. The Everglades is the world’s most beloved, intensely studied wetland. If the Everglades restoration can work, the 21st century could become an era of ecosystem restoration. But it will send a really bad message if it fails.

]]>http://grist.org/article/as-the-world-swelters/feed/0Gale Norton resignshttp://grist.org/article/gale-norton-resigns/
http://grist.org/article/gale-norton-resigns/#respondSat, 11 Mar 2006 01:33:21 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=11952]]>The Denver Post, Associated Press, and other news services are reporting that Gale Norton is stepping down after five years at the helm of the Department of the Interior.

Norton’s taking her leave to “catch my breath, then set my sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector,” according her letter to President Bush. While MSNBC.com primly notes that her “name came up” in connection with the Jack Abramoff inquiry, ThinkProgress is more assertive. Under the headline “Another Abramoff Casualty?” TP notes that Norton received $50,000 from the defrocked lobbyist, who also channeled half a million dollars to her former aide Italia Federici to gain access to Norton and another Interior top official.

Whatever the reason or not-reason, Norton is leaving the Bush cabinet without having achieved her goal of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

Update [2006-3-10 12:7:8 by Emily Gertz]: The folks at ThinkProgress elided the specifics slightly in the post I linked to above (although they’re clearer about them elsewhere on the site). According to indianz.com, this $50K from the Meskwakis Tribe of Iowa actually went to a Norton-founded group, the greenwashy Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy … as did many thousands more from other tribes that employed Abramoff.